Marisa Elena Duarte (Xicanx/Pascua Yaqui Tribe) is an associate professor of justice and social inquiry at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research focuses specifically on Indigenous approaches to information, knowledge, and technology regarding decolonial approaches to digital infrastructures toward social change.

Her 2017 book Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country (University of Washington Press) showed how tribes extend the reach of legal and cultural sovereignty in digital spaces through the construction and command of their own internet network backbones and service providers.

Marisa’s most recent research examines the conditions that shape and impede the build-out of internet infrastructures in rural and tribal regions of the southwest United States. Her work on Indigenous approaches to social media use and information sharing reveal dimensions of Indigenous protocols and politicking, from the influence of feminism to conscientious protection of fragile networks of belonging across temporalities and institutions.

Marisa mentors graduate students who especially focus on topics related to feminist sociotechnics vis-à-vis the inherent rights of US tribes, Indigenous ways of knowing, Black radical liberation, and US-Mexico border-making. Through the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University and the program in Justice and Social Inquiry, Marisa teaches courses on Indigenous methodologies, justice theory, learning technologies in Native education, surveillance and society, digital activism, and gender, science, and technology.

She is a mother and granddaughter within a large and close-knit extended family, a long-time participant in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and an active member of a greater network of antiracist educators in the southwest US.  She lives with her son, husband, and dog in Maricopa County, Arizona.