About this item
In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn't strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn't a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination.
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.
