BC's Excellence in Teaching Day
The University’s Excellence in Teaching Day on May 6 will focus on a series of conversations—including a keynote address by Princeton University scholar Ruha Benjamin—about the impact of generative artificial intelligence on teaching and learning at the university level, according to Center for Teaching Excellence Executive Director Stacy Grooters.
Ruha Benjamin
Benjamin, Princeton’s Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies, is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and researches the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine.
“We are thrilled that Dr. Benjamin will be delivering the keynote address at this year’s Excellence in Teaching Day,” said Grooters. “Her scholarship and our own conversations about GenAI and today’s Boston College classroom will help inform how we prepare students to navigate the intersection of human knowledge and the rapidly expanding presence of the algorithm in the lives of faculty and our students.”
Benjamin is the author, most recently, of Imagination: A Manifesto and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. The Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab convenes students, educators, activists, and artists to develop a critical and creative approach to data conception, production, and circulation in order to serve social justice.
Benjamin received a bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from University of California-Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics and the Harvard University 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 and, in 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation Inaugural Freedom Scholar Award.
Grooters said the center will also be organizing opportunities to discuss readings from Benjamin’s books, such as Race After Technology and Imagination: A Manifesto, in preparation for her keynote lecture. For additional information or to RSVP, see the center’s Excellence in Teaching Day webpage.