Mariel García-Montes is a sociotechnical scholar of media and IT, especially as they relate to the public interest. Her main topics of interest are privacy and information security, social exclusions in technology, and participatory processes.
Currently, Mariel is a PhD candidate at the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society department at MIT, where she is also an affiliate at the Data + Feminism Lab. Most recently, Mariel was a Junior Program Officer at Wikimedia Foundation, a graduate student at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and a research assistant at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. There, she worked at prof. Sasha Costanza-Chock's Codesign Studio and the Design Justice project, and wrote a thesis on tensions in organizational approaches to work on youth and privacy issues in the Americas.
Mariel has worked in communications, instructional design and research around open data, privacy and security, strategic communications and other digital literacies for organizations in Mexico and around the world. She is a philosophy graduate from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Mariel loves passionate opinions in the intersections of technology and society, creative communications efforts, random acts of kindness, passport stamps, and both eating and dancing salsa.
