Broadly, my research explores the cultural and material practices of scientific knowledge production, learning and innovation in Ghana, Nigeria and the United States. I am particularly interested in the politics of race, gender, class and coloniality and how they function as interlocking systems, to shape the sociocultural and geographic landscapes of science and technology for Black/African women today. In this work, I weave together three threads of research. First, I ethnographically explore the lived experiences of West African and African American women scientists and technologists and the ways they navigate, negotiate, and contest multiple ways of knowing, being, and becoming. Second, I document the responses and strategies these women adapt to traverse both global and local scientific and technological networks and the transnational links that tie them to other women across the diaspora. Third, I explore how normative notions of scientist and technologist – as social identities, and processes of enculturation into STEM communities, work to obscure differences and contribute to the production of inequalities along the lines of race, gender, class and place.
My work also engages globalization theories and transnationalism by investigating the responses and strategies these women adapt to navigate both global and local scientific and technological markets and networks. My core interests can be encapsulated in the following questions. What does it mean to be Black, female and to exist in spaces of science and technology? What do their experiences tell us about the structural dynamics of science and technology, relations of power and the constitution of meanings within the sociocultural and geopolitical economies of science? What are the ways the social and cultural processes underpinning knowledge production and technology development contribute to the formation of gendered, raced, classed, and colonial identities?
- Research: Current & Previous
- Current
- Liberatory Code: Race, Gender and the Politics of Computing
- Liberatory Code is a reorientation away from deficit frameworks and pathologies and offers a unique lens into the complex relationships between gender, Blackness, computer science education and technology within a Black women’s educational community. Grounded in ethnography,, this book presents a compelling story about how Black women critique dominant narratives about science and technology, their socio-technical innovations and how they navigate and negotiate complex issues of race, gender, class, and community, to cultivate and imagine liberatory futures for themselves and their students.
- CAREER: Exploring STEM Identity Formation of Black Undergraduate Students through Transdisciplinary Computational Research Experiences
- Using a design-based research approach, this project investigates how transdisciplinary computational learning can support undergraduate students’ persistence, sense of belonging, and identity formation in STEM. This research makes theoretical and empirical contributions to undergraduate computer science education, design-based research, and sociocultural studies of identity and race through an empirical investigation of the ways Black undergraduate students construct, navigate, and negotiate notions of identity, self, belonging and community in relation to computing and its applications.
- Past
- Exploring Identity Formation of Minority Women in STEM through International research experiences
- This research examines the ways in which varying cultural contexts of scientific inquiry may inform these experiences and the complexities of identity formation across the intersections of race, gender, class, and what it means to be a scientist through the cultural and material practices of contemporary international science agendas and networks. This project takes a multi-sited approach combining participant observation, free-listing, semi-structured and structured interviews and experimental research.
- Spelbots: A Case Study for fostering inclusive environments for STEM learning.
- Dissertation Research: Understanding “how” to foster inherently inclusive environments for STEM learning utilizing the strengths of the local institution and its historical mission and thus should contribute to NSF’s mission of increasing the participation on students from underrepresented backgrounds in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.
