Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life

by Ruha Benjamin (Editor)

From electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms to workplace surveillance systems, technologies originally developed for policing and prisons have rapidly expanded into nonjuridical domains, including hospitals, schools, banking, social services, shopping malls, and digital life. Rooted in the logics of racial disparity and subjugation, these purportedly unbiased technologies not only extend prison spaces into the public sphere but also deepen racial hierarchies and engender new systems for social control. The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be resisted and reimagined for more liberatory ends. Moving from traditional sites of imprisonment to the arenas of everyday life being reshaped by carceral technoscience, this volume culminates in a sustained focus on justice-oriented approaches to science and technology that blends historical, speculative, and biographical methods to envision new futures made possible.

Contributors. Ruha Benjamin, Troy Duster, Ron Eglash, Nettrice Gaskins, Anthony Ryan Hatch, Andrea Miller, Alondra Nelson, Tamara K. Nopper, Christopher Perreira, Winifred R. Poster, Dorothy E. Roberts, Lorna Roth, Britt Rusert, R. Joshua Scannell, Mitali Thakor, Madison Van Oort

Genres: Race, Technology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science, Academic, Design

416 pages, Hardcover

Published June 7, 2019

About the author

Ruha Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science and medicine, race and technology, knowledge and power. Ruha is author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford 2013), Race After Technology (Polity 2019), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

Ruha Benjamin received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.

Reviews

[Courtney Tabor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benjamin’s edited volume forces us to think about the ways race and carceral ideology are intertwined with everyday uses of technology, with examples including photography, medicine, credit scores, food, and shopping malls. There is also an inspiring last few chapters on the liberatory possibilities of the tech that offers an alternative to the typical “victims of technology” framing. The language can be quite challenging and inaccessible at times for readers unfamiliar with the background literature, but overall this is an excellent collection of essays from leading scholars in sociology, anthropology, Black and African American studies, and similar fields.

[Shannon Heaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

many of the pieces were real eye-openers. I was glad to have my thinking corrected on a few points.

[chu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenges our ideas of what technology constitutes. Very well organised. Bits of brilliance from particular writers. I’m still hungry for more imaginative potential addressing “conventional” & “dominant” technologies.

[Esra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This remarkable book made me realize what it really means to be surveilled and disciplined by technological tools that have become part-in-parcel of our everyday lives. As ordinary individuals, every bit of our personal quotidian life has become commercialized and securitized. Such surveillance technology left us too little option in terms of liberating ourselves from the monopoly of tech corporations.

[William Fung · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Captivating Technology' exposes how surveillance tech is turning George Orwell's nightmares into Mark Zuckerberg's wet dreams. From ankle monitors to algorithms, Benjamin et al. reveal the hidden prison bars in our smart devices. But it's not all doom and gloom - they also imagine a jailbreak from our digital cells. This book is a real eye-opener in our increasingly 'smart' but perhaps not-so-free world.

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

☝️💻🕯💬🕸

[Rachel M · Rating 5 out of 5]

a very important tool in the handbook of understanding and catching state surveillance and how technology created in our current day functions to control and police. thanks ruha benjamin!!!!!!!

[J. Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Captivating Technology is a collection of essays by various scholars focusing on the topic of technology and how it continues to act as a carceral method to police, monitor, and ultimately control. The volume is divided into several sections, ranging in topics from plantation and prison control to how technology can be revamped to work toward liberatory action. Some of these chapters really had me thinking about aspects of technology I had never considered. These were balanced, however, by other more difficult chapters which I felt had questionable assumptions or questionable methodologies.

The final two chapters of the collection were interviews with prominent thinkers and scholars, Troy Duster and Dorothy Roberts. I quite enjoyed this method of ending the volume as it helped tie together many of the concepts touched on in the preceding chapters. It also gives readers insights into these two figures' backgrounds and how they have pushed their work and activism forward.