California Polytechnic State University
Email: gmedinak (at) calpoly (dot) edu
Gabriel Medina-Kim is a teacher-scholar who focuses on the
culture and practices of critical computer science &
engineering.
Previously, they completed their PhD in the department of
Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute.
Generally, their research explores how we can change the
practices and institutions of computer science and
engineering so that social justice—not oppression—is
one of the default settings.
Medina-Kim's work is interdisciplinary out of necessity. They
synthesize their original training in computer science
with the theoretical commitments of feminist &
anti-racist science and technology studies (STS).
Their dissertation drew on research in STS, computer
science, and women of color feminisms to analyze the
dynamics of systemic change in a university computing
department.
This includes the opportunities produced by the epistemic
culture of computing as well as the social organization of
computing and the university.
Gabriel was a fellow of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Program (NSF GRFP) and the CSU Chancellor's Doctoral
Incentive Program (CDIP).
Click here for more info.
Science, Technology and Society (STS):
feminist anti-racist STS, critical technical practice,
engineering studies, black feminist technology studies,
epistemic cultures.
Education
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Science & Technology Studies, Ph.D.
Science & Technology Studies, M.S.
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Major: Computer Science, B.S. Minor: Women's & Gender Studies Minor: STS—Gender, Race, Culture, Science & Technology Senior Thesis: Power, Equity, and Praxis in Computing: Towards Building
Undergraduate Computing Students' Capacity as Critical Participants
Publications
The Construction of Change Experts and Others
[Extended Abstract]
2025 Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained
Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology
(RESPECT '25). 2025.
doi: 10.1145/3704637.3734755
Thematic Analysis of Junior-Level Computer
Engineering Syllabi
Co-authored with Sophie Martyrossian, Jane Lehr,
Lizabeth Thompson, and Lynne Slivovsky.
ASEE Annual Conference & Expedition, 2025.
doi: 10.18260/1-2--57280
Barriers to Belonging: An Analysis of Student
Perceptions of Culture and Inclusivity in a
Computer Engineering Program
Co-authored with Andrew Danowitz, Briget Benson,
Jane Lehr, John Oliver, Lynne Slivovsky, and
Nina Truch.
ASEE Annual Conference & Expedition, 2025.
Pre-Conference Workshop: Decolonizing what? Limits and
opportunities for developing equitable syllabi in
computer science and engineering education [Extended
Abstract]
Co-authored with Chosang Tenzin, An Huynh, Jane Lehr,
Lynne Slivovsky, and Lizabeth Thompson.
Frontiers in Education (FIE '24), 2024.
doi: 10.1109/FIE61694.2024.10893171
AI Ethics Coheres Because of Anti-Blackness
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
(FAccT '24), 2024. Manuscript peer-reviewed, Abstract published.
Disidentifying with Broadening Participation
2024 Conference for Research on Equitable and Sustained
Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology
(RESPECT '24), 2024.
doi: 10.1145/3653666.3656082
Towards Justice in Undergraduate Computer Science Education:
Possibilities in Power, Equity, and Praxis
Deep Learning for Safer School Infrastructure: An
Interdisciplinary and Cross-organizational Collaboration
Co-authored with Sydney Nguyen, Franz Kurfess, Elise St. John,
Jingzhe Wu, Gudrun Socher, Anurag Uppuluri, Angie Paola Garcia
Arevalo, and Erin Sheets.
ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2021.
doi: 10.18260/1-2--36897
Gender's Influence on Academic Collaboration in a
University-Wide Network
Co-authored with Logan McNichols, Viet Lien Nguyen, Christian
Rapp, and Theresa Migler.
Complex Networks and Their Applications VIII, 2019.
doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-36683-4_8
Presentations
Misogynoir, Engineering Dualisms, and the Mammification
of the Critical Intervention
2025 Annual Meeting for the Society for Social Studies
of Science, 2025.
Analyses of critical interventions in technoscience suggest that interventionists operate within the subjectivities and choicefulness of liberal humanisms. Despite obstinance and defensiveness, interventionists are supposed to choose their tactics and identity: insider/outsider, practitioner/critic, participant/interventionist. But the interventionist is not an unmarked figure who operates with the privileges of western humanisms (e.g., Wynter, 2003). Her labor, experiences, and potential are more accurately described through the controlling image of the mammy (Collins, 2000), an antebellum stereotype for the proper enslaved woman: a caring, obedient, and undesirable Black female slave responsible for rearing and socially reproducing her master's family. My theorization builds upon the evolving control of Black women's labor through (1) the mammification of Black women's professional labor through the expectation to repair failing individuals, organizations, and institutions without adequate power (Omolade, 1994), and (2) the mammification of Black women's academic labor and its direct consequences for junior faculty of color (Willoughby-Herard, 2014). Rather than suggesting that interventionists are Black or performing blackface, I illustrate how misogynoir structures engineering dualisms, expertise, and interventionist practices. My argument comes from a qualitative case study of cultural intervention in a computing department at a public, predominantly undergraduate US university. By analyzing interviews, participant observation, and autoethnographic accounts, I describe how the interventionist is idealized as the mammy: an unoffensive and subservient caretaker. This empirical account redresses the unmarked humanism in theories of critical intervention by beginning from the ontological blackness, demonstrating how sociotechnical change is linked to misogynoir and the imagination of Black femininity.
How does it feel to be a problem (solver)? Du Boisian
problematics and engineering identity
International Network of Engineering Studies (INES)
Workshop on Engineering Interventions: Interdisciplinary
Engagements with Engineers, 2024.
Engineering Studies attends to problem solving and professional identity, emphasizing how engineers work within society. But these examinations have largely assumed the integrity and cohesiveness of the engineer as a person. Things like stereotype threat (Steele, 1997), loyalty to the nation-state, and the culture of disengagement (Cech, 2013) pose fundamental challenges to the formation of engineering identity for minoritized students in the US. The result is a psychic crisis, where minoritized engineers are simultaneously and paradoxically positioned as society’s solution and as society’s problem. Explicitly, this crisis cannot be solved by engineering problem definition and solution (Downey et al., 2006) because learning how to work with people who define problems differently does little for the trauma and terror of being dehumanized as the state’s problem (Hartman, 1997; Spillers, 1987). Returning to the provocation of W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)—how does it feel to be a problem?—I extend a similar question (Sexton, 2010). How does it feel to be a problem solver?
In this presentation, I read across several US-based accounts of engineering identity (Buolamwini, 2023; Riley, 2019; Camacho & Lord, 2013; Downey & Lucena, 1997), including my own. First, I outline how the psychic crisis of being a problem is structured by engineering’s affective orientations: the institutions and culture of engineering. I illustrate how the problematization of minoritized engineers and students produces feeling like a problem. Second, I draw on the writing of Muñoz (2020), who suggests that “feeling like a problem” can direct us to alternative affective community and relations. In doing so, I hope to locate the ambivalence of solving the problem of engineering in the setting of ongoing state-sanctioned genocide.
Difficult Conversations: How the "Unspeakable" Provides
Leverage for Systemic Change in Computer Engineering
and the Possibility of Retrenching its Gendering
Quadrennial EASST/4S joint meeting, 2024.
This presentation presents emergent findings from participatory action research with a community of faculty, students, and alum enacting systemic change in a nascent department of computer engineering. Located at a public university in the United States, this department is uniquely positioned to articulate different visions of computer engineering amidst multiple far-reaching transitions within the university. However, attempts to actualize equity in computer engineering are still bound by organizational histories as well as expressions of race and gender.
Not only did the community set an objective to “speak the unspeakable,” but having “difficult conversations” emerged as an on-the-fly heuristic for evaluating the efficacy of systemic change during conflict. Synthesizing participant observation, interviews, and autoethnography, this presentation analyzes “the unspeakable” and its leverage for systemic change.
The “unspeakable” indexes a traumatic past and an optimistic future. Its definition is connected to shared experiences of trauma that came from previous organizational arrangements and experiences of engineering culture. “Speaking the unspeakable” indexes (1) the desire to heal, and (2) a willingness to break from dominant engineering culture. However, such a praxis risks reifying a gendered social/technical divide. Speaking about feelings became a crucial form of work that contrasted engineering work, but it also produced the need for expertise in caretaking. Women and social scientists became responsible for facilitating, “managing feelings,” and ensuring everyone’s safety (albeit as a praxis of caretaking). While caretaking provides inroads for critical interventionists, its contradistinction to the trauma of engineering culture risks reifying a gendered social/technical divide.
STS as a Site of Refusal: Experience Based Perspectives
on Dis/Loyalty & Divergence in Making & Doing
Co-Discussant with Yumi Aguilar, Victoria Siaumau, and
Jane Lehr.
Quadrennial EASST/4S joint meeting, 2024.
This roundtable features a community of researchers transforming a nascent computer engineering department at a comprehensive public polytechnic university in the United States. All discussants–students/faculty, undergraduates/graduates, engineers/social scientists–are involved in Breaking the Binary (BtB), a cultural intervention in computer engineering that includes pedagogical, curricular, and policy-based reform. Both the computer engineering department and BtB are empowered by the potential for change during intense organizational transition: new department, new school, new grant money, and a campus-wide HSI initiative. These discussants illustrate the various motivations, dynamics, and tensions of making and doing at its most volatile and generative.
Although “STS sensibilities” inform the discussants’ practice, their articulation of making and doing explores disloyalty to STS as an institutional and political practice. The discussants experience pressure to negotiate competing political commitments because US-based STS extends colonial projects of conquest. This included the development of a trauma-informed methodology that valued withholding: a refusal to leverage one’s trauma for others’ self-actualization, a refusal to be the eaten other (hooks, 1992), and sometimes a refusal to be academic. Institutional change, decolonization, and the university create differentially experienced incommensurabilities of STS. This roundtable will do more than explore the dynamics of a making and doing project. Discussants will share their perspectives on how their sociopolitical position and commitments informs their practice–as STS, engineering education, social justice pedagogy, and critical ethnic studies–and how they develop their own dis/loyalties to the projects of STS.
The Chilling of Industrial Tech Ethics? The Interest
Convergence of Responsible AI
Annual Meeting for the Special Interest Group
for Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS), 2023.
Fix intentions; Fix the world. Unintended Consequences as
Power in Teaching Tech Ethics
ESCOCITE/4S Joint Meeting, 2022.
Undergraduate technology and engineering ethics classrooms are important educational spaces because engineers are empowered to reshape relations between humans and the environment. The unintended consequences of designers and engineers are a teaching tool used to teach the ethical responsibility of design and engineering practice. However, tech ethics pedagogy has not responded to STS critiques of the frame of unintended consequences. For example, Parvin & Pollock (2020) suggest that “unintended consequences” are used to shut down anticipatory conversations by foregrounding the intentionality of engineers and designers while eschewing accountability, commitment, and imagination.
This paper advances critiques of the “unintended consequences” frame with a focus on how it consolidates engineering authority, damage-centered narratives of minoritized communities, and the alleged inevitability of technological oppression. First, unintended consequences are an overly producer-centered discourse that consolidates the authority of engineering expertise. Ignoring the overdetermination of engineering and design expertise on technologies suggest that the route to justice is through even more technical expertise, a sort of Super-Engineer (Lehr, Cohen, & Roberts, 2006), instead of participatory methodologies and alternative expertise (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Second, the increasing representation of minoritized communities in unintended consequences produces damage-centered narratives of minoritized communities who lack agency (Tuck, 2009). Third, the consequences that we consider to be “unintended” are often just as politically conditioned as the consequences that are intended. They tend to be predictably oppressive, rather than inevitable (Benjamin, 2019). By re-politicizing unintended consequences, educators may be more likely to foster liberatory political imaginations with their students.
Towards Justice-Centered Critical Participation for
Undergraduate Computer Scientists
Annual Meeting for the Society for Social Studies of Science,
2021.
Good Intentions Are Not Enough: Student-led Interventions
to Reconfigure Relationships Between Engineering, “Caring”
& Development
Co-authored with Michael Reyna, Luka Uchiyama, Krystal
Cardenas, and Jane Lehr.
Annual Meeting for the Society for Social Studies of Science,
2021.
Student-led engineering development projects are examples of attempts to do good. However, the dominant model for development projects is largely based in neoliberal and neocolonial practices. Many student-led development projects - a common method of global competency education for engineers - focus more on what students can learn from their participation in these projects than on benefits to community partners (Lucena, Schneider, Leydens, 2010). While these projects are often labeled as successful, the reality is that these projects typically fail for students and communities(Nieusma & Riley, 2010). While this issue is now well known in STS, less attention has been directed to the self-critical and interventionist work of students engaged in development projects who seek to make visible and disrupt these structures of oppressions. This paper draws from semi-structured interviews with recent alumni of a student-led chapter of a U.S.-based non-profit that seeks to build “a better world through engineering projects that empower communities to meet their basic human needs and equip leaders to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.” The interviewees - during their participation as undergraduate students - had identified ways in which the good intentions of U.S.-based students do not result in good impacts and how dominant practices (including methods of the U.S.-based non-profit) perpetuate oppression. All interviewees also described efforts, successful and unsuccessful, to intervene structurally to create better relations with non-U.S. community partners. What can we learn from these students as we reconfigure engineering to create a more caring and equitable world?
We Need to Renegotiate: Introducing “STS as Whiteness?
Towards Decentering Whiteness in STS”
Feminists in Science and Technology Studies
(FiSTS)
Tri-chair (2025 - Present)
2024 Northeastern Science and Technology Studies Graduate Conference
(NESTS 2024)
Co-organizer (Media & Webmaster) - Troy, NY - 2023/4
Sprinkle: an Undergraduate Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies
Associate Editor (Vol. 13)
- San Luis Obispo, CA - 2019/20
Cal Poly Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers
SHPE Jr. Secretary/Committee Chair/CTO - San Luis Obispo, CA - 2017-20
Feelosopher's Path
Staff Member & Mentor - San Mateo, CA - 2017-20
Land and/as Life
All my work is entangled with the occupation of American Indian
land. As a student of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, my
work is indebted to the Muhheconneok (Mohican people).
As an alumnus of Cal Poly, my work is indebted to the
Yak Titʸu Titʸu Yak Tiłhini (Northern Chumash)
peoples. I currently
reside on the lands of the Rumsen Ohlone people.
And, as all life within
what is referred to as the United States, my work has
benefitted from extensive systems of anti-Blackness, which
backgrounds and frames what is commonly understood as research,
education, and activism today.
I do not wish to "sit with" these longstanding systems of
anti-Blackness and Indigenous genocide, sometimes placated as
mere 'tensions.'
Instead, I work to actively undermine these systems in favor
of supporting the regeneration of Black and Indigenous
life-worlds.
Please join me by supporting any (read all) of the following
initiatives:
Support the rematriation of Kanien’kehá:ka land.
[GoFundMe]