Table of Contents

Foreword / Troy Duster  xi
Acknowledgments / Ruha Benjamin  xv
Part I. Carceral Techniques from Plantation to Prison
1. Naturalizing Coercion: The Tuskegee Experiments and the Laboratory Life of the Plantation / Britt Rusert  25
2. Consumed by Disease: Medical Archives, Latino Fictions, and Carceral Health Imaginaries / Christopher Perreira  50
3. Billions Served: Prison Food Regimes, Nutritional Punishment, and Gastronomical Resistance / Anthony Ryan Hatch  67
4. Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible Preemption / Andrea Miller  85
5. This Is Not Minority Report: Predictive Policing and Population Racism / R. Joshua Scannell  107
Part II. Surveillance Systems from Facebook to Fast Fashion
6. Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy / Winifred Poster  133
7. Digital Character in "The Scored Society": FICO, Social Networks, and the Competing Measurements of Creditworthimess / Tamara K. Nopper  170
8. Deception by Design: Digital Skin, Racial Matter, and the New Policing of Child Sexual Exploitation / Mitali Thakor  188
9. Employing the Carceral Imaginary: An Ethnography of Worker Surveillance in the Retail Industry / Madison Van Oort  209
Part III. Retooling Liberation from Abolitionists to Afrofuturists
10. Anti-Racist Technoscience: A Generative Tradition / Ron Eglash  227
11. Techo-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation across the African Diaspora and Global South / Nettrice R. Gaskins  252
12. Making Skin Visible through Liberatory Design / Lorna Roth  275
13. Scratch a Theory, You Find a Biography: A Conversation with Troy Duster  308
14. Reimagining Race, Resistance, and Technoscience: A Conversation with Dorothy Roberts  328
Bibliography  349
Contributors  389
Index  393

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.

Reviews

"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."
*Somatosphere*

"Benjamin presents a rich and original contribution to critical studies of race and technoscience."
*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.”
*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.”
*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.”
*Technology and Culture*