Ruha Benjamin's Collective Imagination: Freedom and Liberation

AADHum, Project STAND, UMD Libraries, the Office of Multicultural Involvement and Community Advocacy, UMD’s US Latina/o Studies program, and support from the Mellon Foundation came together to host a keynote address featuring distinguished scholar and public intellectual Ruha Benjamin.

Held on September 25, the event brought students, faculty, and community members into a shared space to engage with pressing questions about technology, power, and the role of imagination in shaping more just futures. As a transdisciplinary scholar, Benjamin drew from her extensive body of work to explore the social dimensions of innovation, challenging audiences to think critically about how emerging technologies can both reinforce and disrupt existing systems of inequity.

Throughout the keynote, she traced connections between race and citizenship, health and justice, and knowledge and power, offering a framework for understanding how technological systems are never neutral. At the same time, she emphasized the importance of imagination as a practical and necessary tool for rethinking the structures that shape everyday life. Her insights encouraged attendees to move beyond critique and toward creative, collective re-envisioning.

Drawing on themes from her recent book, Imagination: A Manifesto, as well as earlier works such as Viral Justice and Race After Technology, the talk highlighted the radical potential of centering care, creativity, and accountability in conversations about technological futures.

The keynote offered an intellectually rich and engaging experience that resonated across disciplines. Attendees left with new language, frameworks, and inspiration for approaching the intersections of technology, equity, and imagination in their own work and communities.