Dr. Fatima K. Espinoza Vásquez is a transdisciplinary scholar. Her research examines the intersections of information access, sociotechnical infrastructures, and equity, with a focus on Latinx, immigrants, activists, and other marginalized communities.

She employs a variety of Community-Based, Participatory, and Action Research methods (CBPAR) to holistically explore how structural barriers produce information precarity and shape information practices, health, political participation, and everyday life, to then co-develop with community partners culturally relevant and localized solutions.

Her work on Alternative Sociotechnical Infrastructures (ASIs) and Information Precarity sheds light on the dynamic through which communities create grassroots networks, technologies, and practices to navigate, resist, and reconfigure inequitable systems.

Dr. Espinoza Vásquez leads multi-year collaborative projects with civil society organizations, multidisciplinary researchers, and advocacy groups, generating multimodal datasets, participatory tools, community infrastructures, and community-facing products such as manuals, online portals, and maps that support community agency, belonging, and well-being. Her research appears in leading venues across Information Science, Latinx Studies, and Science and Technology Studies.

Dr. Espinoza Vasquez employs constructivist, collaborative, and justice-oriented teaching approaches, enabling her to design courses that integrate theory with lived experience, emphasizing the co-creation of knowledge, participatory methods, and real-world applications.

In her courses, students are exposed to flipped instruction, scaffolded applied projects, co-learning, and peer evaluation. She employs pedagogies that support diverse, international, and non-traditional students.

Her teaching expertise covers topics such as information access and precarity, digital inequality, alternative sociotechnical infrastructures, Latinx information practices, CBPAR and participatory design, ICT policy and governance, crisis and disaster informatics, health information systems, and the social and cultural dimensions of technology.

She has regularly taught CI-SIS courses like:

• ICT 150 Experience ICTs
• ICT 310 Exploring and Analyzing ICTs: Methodological Approaches
• ICT 311 Introduction to Information Science
• ICT 610 ICT Research Methods
• ICT 590 Special Topics on ICTs and Activism
• ICT 390 Special Topics on Information Governance, Power, and Precarity