About

Angela Booker is an Associate Professor and Provost of Eighth College at UC San Diego. Her research focuses on how youth, families, and schools utilize media and technology for participation, learning, and community development. She is particularly concerned with addressing barriers that reduce access to public participation among underrepresented and disenfranchised communities. Booker employs ethnographic, qualitative, and design-based research methods to examine both typical and emerging practices where youth and adults collaborate, sometimes in conflict. Her work is grounded in collaborations with youth, community partners, educators, and scholars. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University, earned in 2007. Her scholarly contributions include studies on youth civic participation, community-based research ethics, participatory design research, and the intersection of digital media with identity and agency among youth. Booker has received numerous awards, including the Jan Hawkins Early Career Award for Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies and fellowships recognizing her contributions to collaborative research and equitable education.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Political Science
• Multimedia
• Medical education
• Acoustics
• Engineering
• Gender studies
• Engineering ethics
• Knowledge management
• Public relations
• Pedagogy
• Communication
• Physics
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Designing for Expansive Forms of STEAM Disciplinary Engagement

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Increasingly, calls from within the natural and computational sciences are recognizing the need for more expansive forms of disciplinary theory building and practice to connect social theories in the study of natural systems.Within science education and science teacher education, there is an increasing recognition of the need for expansive forms science teaching that connect sociopolitical contexts of science with both the professional learning of teachers and the science taught in K12 classrooms.In this symposium, we explore designs for expansive STEAM disciplinary engagement across classroom, professional learning, and informal Indigenous STEAM settings to understand the ways in which work at the edges of disciplines can transform STEAM teaching and learning for educators and students. Rationale and contribution:Understanding STEAM disciplines, learning and learning environments as always deeply connected to sociopolitical contexts (McKinney deRoysten & Sengupta-Irving 2019) allows us to engage with the "ethical entanglements" (Krishnamoorthy & Tolbert, 2022) inherent in doing, being, and learning in STEAM.Yet the forms of disciplinary engagement often present in STEM and STEAM learning environments often represent settled knowledge that mutes the dynamic, heterogeneous, anti-colonial commitments driving STEM and STEAM disciplinary work at the edges of the disciplines.Within science education and science teacher education, there is an increasing recognition of the need for expansive forms science teaching that connect sociopolitical contexts of science with both the professional learning of teachers (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019) and the science taught in K12 classrooms (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019;Jones, 2024).Increasingly, calls from within the natural and computational sciences are recognizing the need for more expansive forms of disciplinary theory building and practice to connect social theories in the study of natural systems (Schell, et al, 2020;Duncan, et al, 2024).For example, Schell, et al's review (2020) argued that understanding key socio-ecological factors related to, for example, urban heat islands, tree canopy cover and biodiversity, and speciation needs to be critically tied to histories of places that include redlining and racial and class segregation (Schell, et al, 2020).Ongoing debates within ecology around the inadequacy of Darwin's sexual selection theory to account for the abundance of same-sex behavior in the natural world have highlighted need for more expansive forms of studying and teaching about gender/sex in the natural world that move the field towards multiplicities and fluidities of gender and biological sex (Roughgarden, 2013).In the midst of disinformation campaigns, policing of black and brown bodies using surveillance technologies, and proliferation of digital tools for anything from voice recognition to hiring to grocery delivery, scholars working in AI and design of technology and computing systems are increasingly foregrounding the connection between societal structures that uphold white supremacy and settler colonialism and the algorithms that affect our daily lives (Benjamin, 2019).At the same time, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM): Equity in K-12 STEM Education: Framing Decisions for the Future (NASEM, 2024), calls for a clearer articulation of the kinds of powered decision-making that work towards particular purposes for equitable STEM education.The report presents the field with five "equity frames", or "conceptions of equity that can be and are used as rationale for decision-making" (p.133).These are: (1) reducing gaps between groups, (2)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  Acknowled gmentsMuddy Thinking has been the culmination of many years of graduate and postgraduate work that started in San Diego and ended in New Orleans-two very different kinds of places.Throughout, I have carried the steadfast support of my graduate adviser and mentor, Patrick Anderson, who embraced the potential for mud from the outset and simply refused to allow me to stray off into more conventional paths.His introduction to the editors at University of California Press, I believe, was critical for keeping the idea alive and real for me-which it remained through the stewardship of three project editors, who passed the baton flawlessly.My wife, Jessica Shank, has been steadfast in her unerring belief in my ability to complete a dissertation, and now a book.Her support has been crucial, even if at times a little baffling to me.But I accept it as one excepts a very generous giftwith humility.My mother, Sanna Thomas, and stepfather, John Thomas, have been dogged copy editors with precision I have appreciated throughout.They proofread more than their share of work, which, I'm sure,

  DOI

• Designing for a Productive Politics of Participation in Research Practice Partnerships

  Educational Policy · 2022 · 22 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This article considers contested conceptions of community and trajectories toward full participation in research-practice partnerships (RPPs) as key analytical aspects for studying a productive politics of participation. RPPs, as methodology and infrastructure for community participation, frequently surface the character of participation in intersecting communities of practice—making them visible and actionable. I examine two youth-serving RPPs. This analysis considers youth digital media projects as strategies for increasing participation and renegotiating power relations. Findings signal RPPs can help discern the degree to which young people are held on the periphery in communities of practice where marginalizing relations can be reinforced.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Listening to Waves: Engaging Underrepresented Students Through the Science of Sound and Music

  Connected Science Learning · 2021 · 7 citations

  • Acoustics
  • Psychology
  • Mathematics education

  Find out how students use Listening to Waves web applications to explore sound and improve their attitudes toward science.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the dynamics and potentials of reimagining and engaging intergenerational learning

  2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  article

• Reframing playful participation in museums: Identity, collaboration, inclusion, and joy

  International Conference of Learning Sciences · 2020-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Deepening perceptions of learning: Studying and designing ethical practice with researchers, teachers and learners

  2020 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics education

• Integrating Intersectionality into the Study of Learning

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 20 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology

  In this conceptual review, we explore when diversity mediates a recognition of “learning to be a culturally heterogeneous process of engagement in repertoires of practices” (Nasir et al., 2006, p. 699), and when it is wielded as a weapon of normativity. We begin with an inquiry into ways that diversity has been conceptualized as representation and how this conception yields particular forms of reproduction when responding to difference in learning contexts. We then engage a critical interrogation of diversity projects as a mirror for making hegemonic forces more legible. To bring these dialogues to life, we examine school discipline as a case for recognizing the impacts of reductive approaches to diversity. We argue that theories of learning must explicitly identify how power is inscribed in learning contexts (Esmonde & Booker, 2016) in order to effectively sever difference from hegemonic conceptions of diversity and normativity. We conclude by emancipating difference from normativity through moves toward solidarity using intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) and Disability Critical Race Theory (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013). Each reveals vulnerability alongside repertoires of resistance that produce ingenuity. Ultimately, this review explores what happens when intersectional theory disrupts typical discussions of learning and identity that essentialize difference or avoid explicit articulations of power.

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a Nodal Design: Relational Design Across Scale.

  ICLS · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Scholarly work and/as passion

  Mind Culture and Activity · 2019-04-03

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  With regret, we open this issue of Mind, Culture, and Activity acknowledging the loss of Fernando Gonzalez Rey, a deeply human scholar whose work has been central to past and recent developments in...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAP: Collaborative Research: Building Capacity for Political and Cultural Perspectives to Strengthen the Learning Sciences

  NSF · $57k · 2016–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Shelley Goldman

  Stanford University

  12 shared

• Indigo Esmonde

  7 shared

• Lee Martin

  6 shared

• Kristen Pilner Blair

  Stanford University

  5 shared

• Emma Mercier

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  5 shared

• Roy D. Pea

  5 shared

• Na’ilah Suad Nasir

  Spencer Foundation

  4 shared

• Michael Heimlich

  Macquarie University

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Graduate School of Education

  Stanford University

  2007

Awards & honors

• Jan Hawkins Early Career Award for Humanistic Research and S…
• Fellow, UC Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitabl…
• Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE) Presidential Fel…
• Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE) Outstanding Diss…
• IBM Distinguished Student Research Award (2003)