Patricia Garcia

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. I conduct qualitative research on the complex relationship between race, gender, technology, and justice. I am currently working on an NSF CAREER project where I partner with public libraries to study how a computational justice program model can support girls of color (ages 13-16) develop agentic computing identities. This research involves the design of computing education programs that support girls of color in situating their computing identities within broader self-concepts and in ways that highlight how the intersections of race and gender can function as sources of power, rather than simply sites of marginalization.

My other related work examines how harmful data practices perpetuate structural inequities along racialized and gendered lines. I plan to grow this research area by collaborating with data practitioners to imagine how the concept of critical refusal can be used to enact more equitable data practices. This work is done in collaboration with the co-authors of The Feminist Data Manifest-No.

My work contributes to the fields of computing education, learning sciences, youth studies, and critical data studies.