Ruha Benjamin

Assistant Professor, Sociology and African American Studies

PhD, University of California Berkeley (2008)

Sociology 277  | 617.358.6280 |ruha@bu.edu

Curriculum Vitae

BIO AND RESEARCH

I received my BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College (2001), MA and PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley (2008), and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA’s Center for Society & Genetics (2010). My teaching and research interests are in the areas of science, medicine & biotechnology; history and social studies of racial & gender taxonomies; science policy, public health, and critical social theory.

I’m currently completing a book, People’s Science: Reconstituting Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press) , which examines ethnoracial, gender, class, and disability politics as a constitutive feature of stem cell research. Drawing upon multi-sited fieldwork in California’s stem cell agency, biotech industry conferences, legal hearings, civic events,  a stem cell transplant facility, and a sickle cell clinic, I analyze the ways in which social identity and group interests co-produce the scientific, political, economic, and ethical apparatus used to support and contest this emerging science.

A second project, “Provincializing Science: Mapping & Marketing Ethnoracial Diversity in the Genomic Age” is a study of the geneticization of race and nationality in three countries (India, Mexico, and South Africa) that are mapping and marketing the genetic diversity of their populations. I am investigating the ways in which entrenched social classifications intersect with newly derived genetic definitions of peoplehood. I am especially interested in the commercial forces that are driving the creation of  ‘ethnic drug markets’; contestations about the relationship between genes, disease, and environment; and the dynamic interplay between group origin stories and genetic code. A series of forthcoming papers explore these themes.

In the first of these papers entitled ”A Lab of Their Own: Genomic Sovereignty as Postcolonial Science Policy” (Policy & Society, Fall 2009), I argue that research and government elites are strategically calibrating socio-political categories such as race and nationality with scientifically-produced groupings in order to biologically brand their populations. They do so within a sovereignty framework in order to maximize their gate-keeping position vis-à-vis emerging pharmaceutical markets. In seeking to empower the nation, however, scientific elites biologically reinscribe ethnoracial classifications, lending scientific legitimacy to existing social hierarchies.

A third project, the African American DNA Experiment, is an ongoing community engagement initiative that investigates the social impact and meaning of genetic testing for African Americans in forensic, medical, and genealogical settings. Working with collaborators in and outside the academy, I seek to facilitate consultation and participatory research agendas in which African American stakeholders are the critical subjects, not merely objects, of genetic testing.

2012. Genetics and Global Public Health: Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia, Simon Dyson and Karl Atkin (eds), Ch11, Organized Ambivalence: When Stem Cell Research & Sickle Cell Disease Converge. New York: Routledge.

2011. Organized Ambivalence: When Stem Cell Research & Sickle Cell Disease Converge. Ethnicity & Health, Vol. 16, Issue 4-5: 447-463.

2009. A Lab of Their Own: Genomic Sovereignty as Postcolonial Science Policy. Policy & Society Vol. 28, Issue 4: 341-355.

Benjamin, R. People’s Science: Reconstituting Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

Benjamin, R. Provincializing Science: Mapping & Marketing Ethnoracial Diversity in the Genomic Age (in-preparation).