DM Talks Spring 2023: Designing 'Futuring' Learning Experiences with and for Black Women in Computing

Join Virtually on Teams for a DM talk by Takeria Blunt titled: Designing 'Futuring' Learning Experiences with and for Black Women in Computing

More about this talk:

"Black women are one group of people historically marginalized in STEM fields, and thus frequently contend with an “outsider-within” status in all levels of academia and industry. This outsider status often renders Black women invisible, excluded, and/or tokenized in some spaces. formal learning interventions are currently not reflective of recommendations from recent theoretical stances on identity and intersectionality in STEM education. Present literature also scarcely reveals the visions that Black women CS students have of future technologies and techno-futures, which I argue contributes to issues of invisibility and ostracization in the computing field.

My work aims to address these gaps by blending emerging design-based research (DBR) approaches with Black feminist frameworks (i.e. Black feminist thought and Afrofuturist feminism) and Afrofuturist speculative design to develop and test CS learning interventions that: a) support computing identity development through design and invoking the “sociological imagination” in Black women CS students; b) center these students as producers of knowledge and technological artifacts and futures; and c) generate nuanced data about the lived experiences of Black women CS majors, particularly those learning computing at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Overall, this endeavor takes part in reimagining what CSE looks like for these students. It is in this design-based work where we find resources to support, empower, and critically engage Black women CS students during their journeys."