Reimagining Care: Toward Culturally Congruent and Equitable Digital Futures

My research examines how digital and emerging technologies shape health, wellbeing, and care among Black communities, particularly Black women, and how these technologies can be leveraged and designed to advance culturally congruent care and health equity. Situated at the intersection of social work, psychology, and critical digital studies, my work centers community knowledge and participation in imagining more equitable technological futures.

What becomes possible when communities are not simply users of technology, but collaborators in imagining and designing what technology could become?

Three Interconnected Areas of Inquiry

  • 01

    How should we conceptualize care and whose knowledge gets to define it?

    My scholarship develops the theoretical and empirical foundations of culturally congruent care, centering the knowledge and lived experiences of Black women and other historically marginalized communities.

  • 02

    How are Black communities creating care beyond traditional health and social service systems?

    My research examines how Black communities, young people, and other historically marginalized populations use and experience digital and emerging technologies to cultivate care ecologies that support collective wellbeing, identity, connection, and healing. With a particular focus on Black women, I examine how these technologies can be leveraged and designed to advance culturally congruent care and health equity.

  • 03

    How might we build better technological infrastructures for care?

    I examine how emerging technologies, including virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and gaming, as spaces where questions of care, power, and equity are increasingly being negotiated. My work asks how these technologies might be reimagined and designed in partnership with communities to support culturally congruent care and more equitable digital futures.

Research in Action

  • Culturally Congruent Care

    Developing a conceptual framework for culturally congruent care that integrates structural, psychological, relational, practical, sociocultural, and multidimensional dimensions of care.

    Status: Conceptual / Ongoing

  • Digital Care Ecologies

    Examining how Black women use digital platforms for connection, joy, knowledge exchange, resource navigation, safety, and collective affirmation.

    Status: Empirical / Manuscript in Development

  • Digital Care Ecologies

    Developing a framework for understanding how young people witness, respond to, document, and mobilize around violence in digital environments.

    Status: Conceptual / Ongoing

  • Emerging Technologies

    Exploring how immersive technologies might be leveraged and designed to support culturally congruent care and wellbeing among Black women.

    Status: Empirical / Ongoing

  • Emerging Technologies

    Examining how artificial intelligence can reproduce systemic oppression while exploring more accountable, equitable, and community-centered approaches to technological design and governance.

    Status: Emerging Research

Where is this Work Going?

The next phase of research moves beyond documenting technological harms toward designing and evaluating technologies with and for historically marginalized communities.

Through community-engaged, participatory, and speculative approaches, I will examine how Black women, youth, and other communities can shape technologies around their own values, knowledge, and visions for care.

My future work will extend culturally congruent care across populations and contexts, develop and evaluate measures of CCC, and investigate how participatory approaches can shape more equitable digital and emerging technologies.

Toward More Equitable Digital Futures

Ultimately, I seek to build a body of interdisciplinary, community-engaged research that centers historically marginalized communities in shaping technological futures that support healing, wellbeing, belonging, and culturally congruent care.