Biography

My Princeton University and Columbia University degrees weren’t the first to teach me that inequity in education opportunities and outcomes is wide-spread, yet poorly-addressed. Writing my college and scholarship essays on my smartphone and having my mother bus me to the best free advanced academic programs available outside my neighborhood taught me that. When coupled with biases in technology that scholars like Ruha Benjamin, Joy Buolamwini, and Timnit Gebru expose, the future of EdTech and its ability to widen educational divides and be complicit in anti-Black racism is concerning. This conviction will guide my Cambridge PhD research as I investigate the use of EdTech applications by out-of-school youth (OSY). In meditating on what I aim to accomplish in the realm of EdTech, I ultimately start by questioning and analyzing how we adapt technology to students’ learning needs, working alongside students to design interventions. Moreover, I will grapple with how education can be made more equitable and how research is more than a distorted reflection imagined by outsiders studying communities unfamiliar to them. Rather, it’s an interrogation of how the Western world relinquishes agency and legitimacy to these communities.