Patricia Garcia
Assistant Professor, School of Information
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Patricia Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Her work critically examines how women and girls of color construct "a sense of self" in relation to social, cultural, and technical phenomena. Rather than examine identity as an enduring and distinctive sense of self, her projects attend to how the complexities of lived experiences impel situated identity performances. Her current project is an exploration of how girls of color author and perform computing identities, or views of themselves as someone who is fluent in the talking, knowing, and doing of computing. The project is a researcher-practitioner partnership with public libraries in Arizona, California, and Michigan and involves the design of sustainable programs that support girls of color in situating their computing identities within broader visions of future selves and in ways that highlight how the intersections of race, class, and gender can function as sources of power, rather than simply sites of marginalization. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). She holds a PhD and MLIS in information studies from UCLA, an MA in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in English Literature from St. Edward’s University.
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