Ruha Benjamin
Assistant Professor, Sociology and African American Studies
PhD, University of California Berkeley (2008)
Sociology 277 | 617.358.6280 |ruha@bu.edu
BIO AND RESEARCH
Ruha Benjamin
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: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), 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.
SELECT PUBLICATIONS:
2013. People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press)
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.