7: viral justice Ft. Ruha Benjamin

Soul Salon with Ayandastood

I am so thrilled and honored to be in conversation with Ruha Benjamin, a Professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab and author of three books, Viral Justice (2022), Race After Technology (2019), and People’s Science (2013), and editor of Captivating Technology (2019).
Today, we discuss her incredible latest book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want. I am completely obsessed with this book. I feel it is an urgent read for all of us who want to integrate the structural and the individual, the academic and the poetic, the political and the personal, knowing that each of these things are necessarily interlinked and interdependent: just like us.
Ruha writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice. Long before the pandemic, she was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions.
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within." — Ruha Benjamin
I hope you enjoy our conversation!

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Highlights:

(01:20) Get to Know Ruha Benjamin

(02:51 ) What is viral justice?

(04:45) The three types of plotting

(09:44) Ruha's journey shaping this work

(22:40) How can we be vulnerable but not exposed?

(27:38) The power of poetry

(36:16) Mutual aid and other life forms

(41:20) The Doula Effect and how we can bring it to our daily lives

Ruha's Links:

Website:https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/
Instagram:Ruha Benjamin (@ruha9)
Twitter:Ruha Benjamin (@ruha9)
LinkTree to all her work: https://linktr.ee/ruhabenjamin
Links Mentioned:
Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin
Toni Cade Bambara
Mia Mingus blog & Twitter @miamingus
Erik Olin Wright

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