Current Research Areas: privacy, surveillance and social control; internet and platforms; technological openness movements; participatory processes; youth and media; networked social movements; feminist and postcolonial STS; design justice
Mariel García-Montes is a technology capacity builder and researcher from Mexico. Her main topics of interest are privacy and information security, technological openness movements, social exclusions in technology, and participatory processes.
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, the United States, and around the world. She has worked with organizations like UNICEF, Wikimedia Foundation, Internews, and the Latin American Initiative on Open Data (ILDA).
Most recently, Mariel was a research assistant at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. There, she worked at the 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. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and an MA in Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and at the Data + Feminism Lab at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.