Anthropologist, Professor, and User Experience Researcher.
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?