NSF Award
2420678
Auburn University and Florida State University will collaborate to develop a series of workshops to engage members of the Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Alliances and Black, Latina and Native American women graduate students to develop a community of support in computing disciplines. Native American, Latina, and Black women are particularly underrepresented in computing with representation at all degree levels significantly less than the representation of these groups in the U.S. population. While prior work has has championed new approaches to student recruitment and preparation, less research has specifically focused on women of color and their lived experiences in the field of computing. An intersectional focus is important because the needs of women of color cannot be adequately addressed when interventions are designed and analyzed along a single axis of race or gender. Working in collaboration with the BPC Alliances, this project will serve as a step towards establishing a more inclusive and actionable research agenda focused on women of color, specifically Native American, Latina, and Black women in the field of computing. The project activities will center the lived experiences of women of color in computing and re-imagine efforts within and across the BPC-A’s while establishing an actionable research agenda around women of color. <br/><br/>BPC Alliances are uniquely positioned to integrate appropriate frameworks, approaches, and methodologies to transform computing education for women of color at scale, this project will implement a series of workshops to engage members of the BPC Alliances and Black, Latina and Native American women graduate students to develop a community of support in the field of computing. The resulting intersectional research agenda will be a resource to the larger computing community, centering the lived experiences of Black, Latina, and Native women within each of the BPC Alliances and women graduate students enrolled in U.S. computing degree programs. Contributing to the diversity of ideas and perspectives, the project activities will (1) generate deep knowledge of the experiences of women of color; (2) explore the similarities and differences across Native American, Latina, and Black women populations in computing; (3) provide an analysis of the conditions under which different groups of women of color thrive; and (4) examine the trajectories of Native American, Latina, and Black women populations in computing.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
