I am Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University where I study the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. I am also the founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab, and a faculty associate in the Center for Information Technology Policy, Program on History of Science, Center for Health and Wellbeing, and Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies. I also serve on the executive committees of the Program in Global Health and Health Policy and Center for Digital Humanities.
Over the last decade, I have written four books, Imagination: A Manifesto (Norton 2024), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton University Press 2022), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity 2019), People’s Science: Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), and edited Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press 2019).
Taken together, this body of work addresses debates about how science and technology shape the social world and how people can, should, and do critically engage technoscience, grappling all the while with the fact that what may bring health and longevity to some may threaten the dignity and rights of others.
I arrived here by way of a winding road that has snaked through South Central Los Angeles; Conway, South Carolina; Majuro, South Pacific, and Swaziland, Southern Africa. I come from many Souths, and I tend to bring this perspective, of looking at the world from its underbelly, to my analysis.
To start at the proverbial beginning, my interest in the relationship between science, technology, medicine, and society can be traced to this clinic in Wai (pronounced “Why”), India, where I was born in a Bahá’í family to a Persian-Indian mother and African-American father. Their stories of the one-size-fits-all stirrups, stainless steel bed around which resident-chickens squawked, and nurses who waited on my mom day and night—ignited my imagination about the places where cold tools and warm humans meet.
Whether we dub it ‘science and society’, ‘medicine and culture’, ‘technology and values’, the relationship between what are commonly thought of as separate spheres of human experience fuel many of my current preoccupations. My work as a researcher and teacher continues to take shape in the borderlands of mainstream institutions and the messiness of everyday life.
Dad’s Side
Mom’s Side
The way we classify and are classified as different human kinds, is another enduring interest that grows out of the social boundary crossing of the folks pictured above. This family was my first classroom, where I became a student of race-ethnicity, gender, class, citizenship, and diaspora — an ongoing touchstone for questioning what ‘comes naturally.’ They also helped me to see that innovation isn’t limited to shiny new gadgets and experimentation doesn’t just happen in sterile laboratories; people experiment and innovate in their everyday lives all the time, challenging ‘how things have always been done’, and producing knowledge and tools for living a good life that are valuable well beyond the patent office.
So when it all boils down, the tension between innovation and equity is mainly what keeps me up at night.
How do we develop approaches to health and well-being that don’t simply substitute technological fixes for wider social change? Fixes that do more to widen the gross inequities that already stratify life chances? How do we advance life sciences without reinforcing popular conceptions of race … as biological? Gender… as destiny? Or disability… as tragic? After all, as we push the boundaries of the ‘human’ with science and technology, we are also reinforcing (and sometimes redrawing) social fault lines in often-unexpected ways.
In case you made your way here looking for a more formal overview of my academic history, the following represents some highlights:
International Baccalaureate, Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa (1996)
BA in Sociology and Anthropology, Spelman College (2001)
MA and PhD in Sociology, University of California, Berkeley (2008)
Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Society and Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles (2010)
Faculty Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School Science, Technology, and Society Program (2012-13)
Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (2016-17)