Queer science: Temporality and futurity for queer students in STEM

Abstract

The sociopolitical landscape for queer people has changed dramatically in recent decades; however, progress has been both halting and uneven. While this is evident in many areas of professional and private life, this study focuses on the experiences of queer students in STEM learning environments in US colleges and universities. Specifically, we explore student expressions of temporality and futurity with regards to their STEM experiences and aspirations. Engagement with queer theory, especially queer formulations of time and space, alerted us to the importance of sociopolitical developments of the past several decades—particularly the rise and entrenchment of neoliberal politics in both academic STEM arenas and gay and queer politics. Engaging with queer temporality and spatiality, neoliberalism, and the homonormative turn, we found three interdependent themes: (1) the (re)negotiation of queer politics within academic disciplines linked to the neoliberal state; (2) the multiple bifurcations of self, time, and space required to simultaneously navigate queerness and STEM; and (3) the development of utopian projections of the future intended to reconcile queer identity, neoliberalism, and STEM. These findings point to a tension between queer identities and STEM fields arising not from the nature of the fields themselves but from science’s interconnectedness with a neoliberal economy. This tension not only structures participants’ current experiences in STEM learning spaces but also flavors the way they consider their futures as queer scientists.

Increasing inclusion & competency in STEM: Understanding LGBTQ+ history, barriers, and heteronormativity

“…Although the 2010s saw some LGBTQ+ movements achieving mainstream support, a majority of these focused on conformist gains rather than holistic LGBTQ+ community protection and inclusion [47][48][49]. Furthermore, protections were and still are often piece-meal and based on state legislatures.…”

“…Out individuals are more likely to consider leaving STEM fields due to increased discrimination and victimization, risks that are worse in rural areas [2,[88][89][90]. This can lead to compartmentalization where LGBTQ+ scientists separate their LGBTQ+ identities from their professional science identities [48]. This may be particularly strong in locations where LGBTQ+ identities are criminalized or face social stigmatization [91].…”

“…A better understanding of the presence and experiences of LGBTQ+ people in STEM is limited by research on LGBTQ+ identities in higher education and in science that has largely focused on undergraduates, with less information available about graduate students, faculty, and other professional scientists [134,136]. Data are also lacking about the presence and experiences of BIPOC and disabled people in science, identities which intersect with LGBTQ+ identities and are severely under-represented in STEM and data [1,48]. This lack of data collection is due to the common view that LGBTQ+ identities are non-consequential [137], or that studies on LGBTQ+ identities may lead to harassment of the researcher themself [138].…”

Whiteness and the Rainbow: White LGBTQ+ College Students’ Racial Identity Development

“…The recent body of literature explores LGBTQ+ student belongingness (Duran, Dahl, et al, 2020), academic experiences (Beattie et al, 2021;Friedensen et al, 2021;Linley et al, 2018), and campus experiences (Garvey et al, 2018;Woodford et al, 2017), as well as the institutional structures intended to support LGBTQ+ students, including LGBTQ+ campus resource centers (Marine & Nicolazzo, 2014;Pitcher et al, 2018;Self & Hudson, 2015). While the default population generally has been White…”

Elementos centrales de experiencias educativas con enfoque STEM

“…Parte de la transformación en la educación que pretende el enfoque STEM es la reducción de la brecha de género (Oliveros-Ruiz, 2019, Saffie-Robertson, 2020Vallejo, 2019), el estudio de las barreras y retos que atraviesan las poblaciones afroamericanas matriculadas en carreras STEM (Lancaster y Jade Xu, 2017), el aprendizaje de comunidades identificadas como queer, que exponen por medio de las experiencias STEM su cultura y entorno extraescolar (Friedensen et al, 2021), entre otras.…”