About

Coleen Carrigan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. Her research interests encompass critical race feminist theory, cultural anthropology, science and technology studies, medical anthropology, ethnography, and action research. She also focuses on class theory, intersectionality, engineering education, critical methodologies, broadening participation, and diversity. Carrigan's interdisciplinary approach integrates social theories and methodologies to explore issues related to equity and inclusion within engineering and technology fields, emphasizing the importance of diverse perspectives in education and research.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Pedagogy
• Artificial Intelligence
• Data science
• Epistemology
• Gender studies
• Anthropology
• Media studies
• Nuclear engineering
• Internet privacy
• Engineering
• Materials science
• Forensic engineering
• Composite material
• Programming language
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Building Community Through Professional Development: The LATTICE Program

  2024-02-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering (LATTICE) is a national program to increase the retention and advancement of women academics in engineering and computer science. This NSF ADVANCE funded effort has a focus on community, ongoing connections, and professional development to support women as they navigate the postdoctoral and junior faculty stages. These early career stages are a crucial time of transition, and an important opportunity for retention of women in engineering and computer science. For individuals who are an "only" in terms of their social identity (e.g., gender, race, sexuality, ability status, etc.), the isolation during this transitional period can be particularly acute. Research shows that a strong connection to community can counter this isolation, and that the resulting sense of belonging is important to individual success and persistence in STEM. The LATTICE program is designed to build community and ongoing support while providing professional development. This presentation will introduce the LATTICE program theory and design, then discuss evaluation findings, unexpected challenges, and planned modifications to continue to improve the program. The LATTICE program begins with a four-day symposium that weaves together professional development skill building and conversations about social identity. The symposium activities and resulting community lay the foundation for deeper and ongoing support through the peer Mentoring Circles. Each Mentoring Circle, composed of eight to nine participants, provides a frequent and safe forum to discuss concerns, gain perspective, problem-solve, and set personal goals. The first LATTICE symposium was held May 18-21, 2017 with participants who were early-career women from electrical engineering and computer science. The second LATTICE symposium for women in any field of engineering who are underrepresented minorities will be held May 30-June 2, 2019. Evaluation data shows that the LATTICE symposium is a valuable experience for participants, who benefit both from the information discussed and the relationships they began at the symposium. Further, the Mentoring Circles help build community, while providing needed support and accountability. Within several months of participation, participants perceive that the LATTICE program is having a positive impact on their self-confidence and ability to proactively engage in career-building behaviors, such as asking for resources, seeking advice, and starting collaborations. Participants self-reported statistically significant improvements in both self-efficacy and networking activity. LATTICE participants came to the first symposium with a wide array of experiences and perceptions of bias. In order to more fully address the intersectional identities of participants while building a cohesive community, programmatic modifications are planned for the second symposium. One modification will be to incorporate the pedagogical tool of caucusing, in which participants suggest the social identities they wished to caucus around (e.g., Black, Spanish-speaking, first-generation). This allows participants (and panelists) an opportunity to gather in affinity groups of self-identified salient identities, serving to enhance and support communication, while building the capacity to understand their own identities and thereby build authentic relationships across identities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ADVANCE-ENG Success at the Intersection of Formal and Informal Networks for Women of Color (WOC) Engineering Faculty

  2024-02-13 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Underrepresented Minority (URM) women engineering faculty are leading change in the academy through outstanding research and leadership endeavors. A 2005 ADVANCE Leadership award entitled, "Peer Mentoring Summits for Women Engineering Faculty of Color" convened the first ever set of summits focused on URM women engineering faculty. Using a "where are they now" approach, we will highlight the accomplishments of participants in this initiative started 12 years ago. While this group does diversify the faculty, their roles in the academy are not focused solely on issues of diversity. For example, as administrators, it is critical to recognize their intellectual contributions to academic policy, research and pedagogical advancements in higher education. Given the increasing number of workshops, summits and publications focused on Women of Color (WOC) STEM academicians, we will present experiential perspectives and summarize these efforts for WOC STEM faculty. The subsequent development of cross-cultural collaborations in a new multi-university NSF-ADVANCE project entitled, "Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: An Intentional Community in Engineering (LATTICE)" will also be presented. While intersectionality defines unique issues at the intersection of race and gender, this paper explores the expansion of formal networks of our diverse LATTICE team building on the success of previous faculty development initiatives. The paper will also discuss how ongoing informal networks continue to incorporate mentoring and coaching to empower women engineering faculty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Collaborative Ethnography and Matters of Care in Counterspaces

  Engaging Science Technology and Society · 2024-04-22 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper offers a reflexive analysis of an interdisciplinary and cross-race collaboration to advance equity in engineering called LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering). We engage two bodies of scholarship—matters of care in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and critical race theory on counterspaces—to theorize on the data infrastructure and narrative practices that we developed when applying critical methodologies to collective action in technoscience. We discuss how our care practices conflicted with traditional ethnographic practices and thus, inspired us to innovate on methods. These methods—member-checking and polyvocal memo-ing—make transgressing the boundaries of LATTICE counterspaces for public dissemination possible by invoking caring as praxis. We conclude that using these methods to discuss the contradictions and challenges in STS collaborations is an opportunity for advancing mutual intelligibility among interdisciplinary scholars and a politics of knowledge production grounded in values of care and friendship that may contribute to equity and justice in technoscience.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Overcome Gender Discrimination in STEM Using the Case Study Method

  2024-02-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Using ethnography, she investigates the cultural dimensions of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), with a particular emphasis on Computer Science and Engineering, and why these high-status fields appear impervious to desegregation. Professor Carrigan shares the findings from her research to foster welcoming environments in STEM and

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sheltering: Care Tactics for Ethnography Attentive to Intersectionality and Underrepresentation in Technoscience

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2023-11-05 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Designing ethnographic research on the technoscience workforce according to intersectionality theory presents both opportunities and constraints. On the one hand, the pursuit of justice in technoscience requires attending to differences between scientists who have been disenfranchised from knowledge production due to racism and sexism. On the other hand, sharing the lived experiences of severely underrepresented members of technoscience heightens the risk of harm. I introduce a practice called Sheltering, inspired by the computer science technique of “black boxing” and feminist methodology of “strong objectivity.” The opacity of the shelter in which some data resides is balanced with the transparency of the researcher’s positionality. Combining reflexivity, refusal, and performative design, Sheltering contests dominant norms in science, while minimizing risks of retaliation to collaborators. It also balances communal responsibilities with research integrity. It not only requires consideration for the researcher’s relationship with collaborators, but also attention to power in the worlds they navigate and solidarity in their struggles. Sheltering, a repertoire of care tactics to protest epistemic and social injustice in US knowledge production, can help transform who gets to produce science and reimagine other ways of knowing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Negotiating boundaries: an intersectional collaboration to advance women academics in engineering

  Engineering Studies · 2023 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  This paper draws on data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE-funded LATTICE program (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering) to examine how a diverse group of women worked across social and professional identities to support early-career women in academic engineering. We used ethnography to elucidate the social dynamics and power relations involved in forming a coherent group identity for the LATTICE leadership team, and the boundaries we negotiated in running the LATTICE program. We identify the processes and behaviors through which we made boundaries between members salient yet porous to build a coherent community across various dimensions of difference. We offer three actionable strategies that impact change agents' engagement and the group's coherence across multiple dimensions of difference: (1) intentionally creating a socio-emotional culture in our group, one that spans across group members' personal and professional identities; (2) validating other group members' perspectives, and (3) striving to build consensus using storytelling. These strategies of the LATTICE leadership team provide guidelines for others who work across intersecting dimensions of difference.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Caring for Equitable Relations in Interdisciplinary Collaborations

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2023-11-05 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Collaborative research between scholars of science and technology studies (STS)and scholars of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a growing trend. The papers assembled in thisSpecial Section offer both embodied and empirical knowledge on how ethnographers negotiate our roles in integrative research when constrained by what our technoscientific collaborators value, what funders demand, what our home institutions expect, what we want to learn from the worlds we study, and the social transformations we envision in science and society. We grapple with how we as ethnographers can best balance caring for the communities we study, the ones we serve, and the ones we identify with. We take care that knowledge making is political. Race, gender, class, and ability status of scholars intersect with the organizational, institutional, and cultural contexts in which we practice science to shape and be shaped by entrenched power relations.Through a feminist politics of care, this collection transforms tensions in interdisciplinary collaborations into resources that enlarge our understandings of what these collaborations are like for STS ethnographers, make visible certain labors within them and, crucially, enrich our vision for what we want these collaborations to be.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cracking the Bro Code

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2023 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Forensic engineering
  • Nuclear engineering

  Why dominant racial and gender groups have preferential access to jobs in computing, and how feminist labor activism in computing culture can transform the field into a force that serves democracy and social justice. Cracking the Bro Code is a bold ethnographic study of sexism and racism in contemporary computing cultures theorized through the analytical frame of the “Bro Code.” Drawing from feminist anthropology and STS, Coleen Carrigan shares in this book the direct experiences of women, nonbinary individuals, and people of color, including her own experiences in tech, to show that computing has a serious cultural problem. From senior leaders in the field to undergraduates in their first year of college, participants consistently report how sexism and harassment manifest themselves in computing via values, norms, behaviors, evaluations, and policies. While other STEM fields are making strides in recruiting, retaining, and respecting women workers, computing fails year after year to do so. Carrigan connects altruism, computing, race, and gender to advance the theory that social purpose is an important factor to consider in working toward gender equity in computing. Further, she argues that transforming computing culture from hostile to welcoming has the potential to change not only who produces computing technology but also the core values of its production, with possible impacts on social applications. Cracking the Bro Code explains how digital bosses have come to operate imperiously in our society, dodging taxes and oversight, and how some programmers who look like them are enchanted with a sense of divine right. In the context of computing's powerful influence on the world, Carrigan speculates on how the cultural mechanisms sustaining sexism, harassment, and technocracy in computing workspaces impact both those harmed by such violence as well as society at large.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “The revolution will not be supervised”: Consent and open secrets in data science

  Big Data & Society · 2021 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  The social impacts of computer technology are often glorified in public discourse, but there is growing concern about its actual effects on society. In this article, we ask: how does “consent” as an analytical framework make visible the social dynamics and power relations in the capture, extraction, and labor of data science knowledge production? We hypothesize that a form of boundary violation in data science workplaces—gender harassment—may correlate with the ways humans’ lived experiences are extracted to produce Big Data. The concept of consent offers a useful way to draw comparisons between gender relations in data science and the means by which machines are trained to learn and reason. Inspired by how Big Tech leaders describe unsupervised machine learning, and the co-optation of “revolutionary” rhetoric they use to do so, we introduce a concept we call “techniques of invisibility.” Techniques of invisibility are the ways in which an extreme imbalance between exposure and opacity, demarcated along fault lines of power, are fabricated and maintained, closing down the possibility for bidirectional transparency in the production and applications of algorithms. Further, techniques of invisibility, which we group into two categories—epistemic injustice and the Brotherhood—include acts of subjection by powerful actors in data science designed to quell resistance to exploitative relations. These techniques may be useful in making further connections between epistemic violence, sexism, and surveillance, sussing out persistent boundary violations in data science to render the social in data science visible, and open to scrutiny and debate.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Articulating a Succinct Description: An Applied Method for Catalyzing Cultural Change

  Human Organization · 2021-06-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Articulating a Succinct Description uses ethnographic data to create case study interventions facilitated with people who belong to the culture with whom the ethnographer is engaged. We do so in order to disseminate research findings, address problems presented in the case, and collect additional data for further collective analysis. Further, Articulating a Succinct Description is designed as a means of intervention for underrepresented group members to be heard and gain support and promote equity engagement among majority members in efforts to create more inclusive cultures. In this paper, we validate this method using findings from its application with engineering students at a public university. This method allowed us to view engineering culture not as monolithic, but rather as one with multiple sets of cultural beliefs, values, and behaviors. In particular, we noted a behavior among students we’ve called Swing Staters, who expressed meritocratic beliefs, yet, who we argue, may be critical to reducing bias in engineering education. These findings, analyzed along interwoven threads of race and gender, demonstrate the efficacy of the Articulating a Succinct Description method and contribute to efforts in engineering education to advance pedagogical tools to reduce bias and exclusions in these fields.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julie S. Ivy

  North Carolina State University

  52 shared

• Saejin Tanguay

  University of Washington

  49 shared

• Christine Grant

  North Carolina State University

  46 shared

• Jessica T. DeCuir‐Gunby

  36 shared

• Barbara Smith

  University of Washington

  36 shared

• E.A. Riskin

  University of Washington

  26 shared

• Joyce W. Yen

  Pennsylvania State University

  24 shared

• Cara Margherio

  19 shared

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Devel…
• College Award, Early Career Achievement for Excellence in Sc…
• American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Educationa…
• University of Washington, Project for Interdisciplinary Peda…
• NSF Collaborative Research: National Research Traineeship Pr…