Captivating Technology

“Captivating Technology brings together a range of incisive analyses that reveal the various ways contemporary technologies renew, deepen, and extend carceral conditions across society and how the carceral complex fuels technological developments with broader social implications. The collected volume importantly offers a range of examples of social technologies for liberatory ends. Ruha Benjamin has brought together a terrifically creative, insightful, and necessary group of compelling accounts. A much needed antidote for troubled times.” - David Theo Goldberg, author of Are We All Postracial Yet?

“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.” - Anne Pollock, author of Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

"Captivating Technology provides abundant evidence. . . showing how discriminatory biases lead to incarceration, surveillance and oppression through technology, and then sets out to prove that the only way towards a non-discriminatory society must acknowledge such biases of technology in order to develop anti-racist, truly liberatory technologies." - Valentina Romanzi, Iperstoria

"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

"Benjamin presents a rich and original contribution to critical studies of race and technoscience." - Clara Hick, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“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

“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

“[Captivating Technology] is an ideal in action; unfettered by carceral imaginations, scholars can invent different worlds that replace—and not merely, through reform, extend—the discriminatory societies we have made together.” - David Theodore, Technology and Culture

"Benjamin’s edited volume Captivating Technology is bursting at the seams with exciting work from leading scholars on race and technoscience." - Courtney Tabor, Journal of Race and Policy