Anthropologist, Professor, and User Experience Researcher.
Research: Current and Past
Current
Liberatory Code: Race, Gender and the Politics of Computing
Liberatory Code is a reorientation away from deficit frameworks and pathologies andoffers 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.
