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

From electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms to workplace surveillance systems, technologies originally developed for policing and prisons have rapidly expanded into non-juridical 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 appropriated 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 approaches 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 Review " Captivating Technology...is an excellent collection that is compelling both in rich individual chapters and in the synthetic whole.... One of the strengths of this collective volume is its deliberate use of literary technologies."--Vivette García-Deister and Anne Pollock "BioSocieties" (9/28/2021 12:00:00 AM) " Captivating Technology is a powerful and deeply creative text that excavates suppressed histories just as much as it works towards building new futures."--Susila Gurusami "Surveillance & Society" (3/16/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Benjamin presents a rich and original contribution to critical studies of race and technoscience."--Clara Hick "Ethnic and Racial Studies" (2/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "The book comes at a timely moment, contributing to pressing contemporary conversations about predictive algorithms, bias in AI, new modes of surveillance, and the myriad ways our increasingly technologically mediated lives are experienced unequally along lines of race, class, and gender. . . . Captivating Technology offers a meaningful contribution to public and scholarly discussions of technological (in)justice."--Naomi Zucker "Somatosphere" (12/23/2019 12:00:00 AM) Review “ Captivating Technology exemplifies that rare but exquisite quality that makes an edited collection worthwhile: unfailingly strong individual contributions that are brought together in a way that makes a distinctive and insightful intervention. Combining nuanced understandings of the power of science and technology together with critical race critique, this timely volume is poised to set the agenda for the field.” Author: Anne Pollock, author of Source: Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference From the Author Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. About the Author Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier.