Anthropologist, Professor, and User Experience Researcher.
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.
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.
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.
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.