IA Book Club – Imagination: A Manifesto

Wednesday, June 12, 2024: Imagining America invites participants across the network to join IA staff in reading Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024).

We encourage groups to read and talk about the book together. IA will host an online Study Group for deeper discussion on Wednesday, June 12, 2024 at 1:00-2:00pm PT / 3:00-4:00pm CT / 4:00-5:00pm ET.

Register Here

About the Book

In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.

A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.

Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable—but all emerged from the human imagination.

About the Author

Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies and the founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University. The author of the Stowe Prize–winning Viral Justice, as well as Race After Technology and People’s Science, Benjamin lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Purchase the book from your local bookseller or online at Bookshop.org.