Queering STEM Culture in US Higher Education

Navigating Experiences of Exclusion in the Academy

Kelly J. Cross, Stephanie Farrell, Bryce Hughes, Kelly J. Cross, Stephanie Farrell, Bryce Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000592917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Adopting an intersectional lens, this timely volume explores the lived experiences of members of the queer and trans community in post-secondary STEM culture in the US to provide critical insights into progressing socially just STEM education pathways.

Offering contributions from students, faculty, practitioners, and administrators, the volume highlights prevailing issues of heteronormativity and marginalization across a range of STEM disciplines. Autoethnographic accounts place minority experiences within the broader context of social and cultural phenomena to reveal subtle and overt forms of exclusion, and systematic barriers to participation in STEM professions, academia, and research. Finally, the book offers key recommendations to inform future research and practice.

This volume will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in higher education, engineering education, and the sociology of education more broadly. Those involved with diversity, equity, and inclusion within education, queer theory, and gender and sexuality studies will also benefit from this volume.

1What Do We Know and Why Should We Support Queer and Trans People in STEM?

Bryce E. Hughes, Stephanie Farrell, and Kelly J. Cross

DOI: 10.4324/9781003169253-1

Introduction

As editors, we came together to address what we observed was a need in our science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education literature: to better understand what it was like for someone in STEM who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer; transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming (LGBTQ+¹). People had been asking Kelly, in particular, for years to tell her personal story as a Black gay woman, and her experiences caused her to realize the need to bring in more voices and to learn more about people who are LGBTQ+ in STEM. We are compiling this book at a time when great advances have been made toward queer and trans people's civil rights, and when queer and trans people's civil rights are simultaneously under attack. One major aim of this book is to be a resource for individuals on a pathway toward allyship who want to learn more about what their queer colleagues are facing without relying on those colleagues to provide the full emotional labor needed for their education. What queer people are facing at a societal level is what queer people in STEM are also facing.

Research on the experiences of queer people in STEM has been emerging over the past 15 years, yet this research is still sparse. We knew these studies were only scratching the surface of the experience of being queer in STEM. We felt a collection of individual narratives—or counterstories, as our critical race theorist colleagues might call them—could add rich experience and context to show how being queer shapes a person's pursuits of a career in STEM in academia and in industry. The existing research paints a picture of a STEM climate for queer people, including the personal and professional consequences experienced in navigating that climate, but what this research misses are the dynamic ways queer people have maneuvered and resisted hostile climates to construct spaces for themselves in science and engineering. Studies tend to capture a snapshot of people's lives, whereas personal stories allow individuals to explain how they arrived at the place they are today. Research also tends to reduce queer people's experiences down to a set of knowable “facts” about the environment that may feel static and difficult to change, whereas hearing someone's story can create a moment of empathy between people to open possibilities for relationship and coalition building that may lead to real, sustainable change.

People often claim that issues of diversity are not relevant to practice in STEM beyond redressing practices and policies that have systematically excluded people of color, women, people with disabilities, and other minoritized people from working in STEM fields. All too often people in STEM believe and operate in ways that suggest that who you are should not matter if you are doing good science. This aphorism sounds nice as an ideal, but it fails to acknowledge the reality that the human aspects of science are incredibly influential despite remaining quite hidden; this viewpoint ignores the discriminatory history under which the scientific procedures were developed. The person conducting the science determines the questions being answered and the interpretation of results, and thus the person conducting the science must be cognizant of all the communities potentially impacted by the outcomes. Our moral proclivities play a role as well in deciding what might be considered a “good” outcome versus a “bad” outcome. One may say that your sexuality or your gender should not matter in terms of experimentation or innovation, yet sexuality and gender have long been the subject of scientific inquiry themselves. Studies have been used to reinforce biases against queer and trans people. We need the contributions of queer people in STEM, and this book stands to make some of those people more visible on their own terms.

Autoethnographic Approach

Queer people in STEM have been silenced and/or ignored, but we have methods for breaking that silence and allowing people to describe their lives in their own words. We guided our chapter authors through a process informed by autoethnography. Autoethnography is a research method used to analyze one's own experiences to help understand culture (Ellis, 2004; Holman Jones, 2005). As suggested by the name, ethnography is a research method used to study culture in depth, and the prefix “auto” refers to the self. Whereas ethnography possesses a troubled history used to exploit the experiences of oppressed and minoritized people, autoethnography brings the ethics and politics of oppression and marginalization to the forefront to produce research with a focus on increasing social justice and social consciousness from the emic, or insider, perspective of the minoritized person (Adams & Holman Jones, 2008).

Autoethnography is a common approach for conducting research on minoritized experiences, like those of queer and trans people, and other people whose experiences sit at the intersections of power and oppression. The researcher becomes the subject of the research, and thus the subject of the research takes control over how their experiences are represented in the final product, allowing subjectivity and emotionality into the process in a way that is typically hidden in traditional research (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). We do not claim these chapters to be formal autoethnographies within themselves. We provided the authors a process borrowed from autoethnography research tradition to help them illuminate their experiences to reveal how they experience their identities within the STEM culture.

Intersectionality

We also felt it was essential to recruit a diverse array of authors whose experiences reflected a range of what it means to be queer in STEM. The research literature on queer people in STEM is predominantly about middle class white people in STEM. It is neither informative about queer people in STEM with disabilities, nor inclusive of transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming people with only a few notable exceptions, among other limitations. By featuring a diverse array of voices in STEM, we employ intersectionality to reveal how anti-queer oppression intersects with, and is connected to, other oppressions (and privilege) to shape the material and intangible outcomes of LGBTQ+ people pursuing a career in STEM.

Intersectionality emerged as a concept in Black feminist scholarship to describe the analytic sensibility needed to examine the interlocking structures of power that Black women navigate in their everyday lives (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013; Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins, 2009). The concept has shown utility in other settings for drawing explicit attention to the ways power shapes the lives of people with intersecting minoritized identities. Cho et al. (2013) summarized, “What makes an analysis intersectional. . . is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power” (p. 795). Many people mistake intersectionality as a simple analysis of the multiple dimensions of identity. We all have multiple identities that interact and interlock with each other to form our core sense of self (Abes, Jones, & McEwen, 2007), with some becoming more prominent or important to us depending on the setting we are in or the extent to which we have reflected on these aspects of ourselves.

What intersectionality offers to this analysis is the dimension of power: our experiences of intersecting privilege and oppression reflect interlocking systems of privilege and oppression in society (Bowleg, 2012). Intersectionality offers a more authentic interpretation of human experience as it considers the simultaneous impact among interlocking system of oppression that have a multiplicative effect rather than a simple conception of an additive effect (Bowleg, 2008). It helps us understand how the experience of intersecting identities leads to different outcomes that can reproduce social inequality (Núñez, 2014).

Our focus on STEM fields is aligned with one important area of intersectional scholarship drawing attention to the ways school and work, as institutions we participate in as part of our everyday lives, play a role in either reinforcing or reducing social inequality (Hill Collins, 2015). It also helps draw our attention to the ways STEM fields and higher education are invested in the form of neoliberal, globalist capitalism that characterizes the United States economy today that situates people as sources of labor to be exploited rather than holistic beings with agency who aim to self-actualize (Anthias, 2013; Riley, 2008a).

Audience

Our primary audience for this book is queer people in STEM who have yet to see their experiences reflected in a meaningful way. Yes, one of our aims is to provide a resource for people who are actively negotiating their queer identity and developing a sense of allyship with queer communities in STEM, but foremost we are writing these stories for our colleagues who feel isolated or silenced. Our secondary audience then are our co-conspirators in STEM who are not queer or trans but who share our vision for achieving social justice in STEM. These colleagues are actively working to engage allyship alongside their queer and trans colleagues, as well as other minoritized people in STEM, and they view allyship as an action rather than a destination. We also sincerely hope this book can find its way into the hands of people who may not fully understand what it means to be queer or trans but are open to learning and developing empathy. Many of these people can be counted among people with power and authority to enact institutional change in STEM—may this book serve as a resource for creating change that broadens participation in STEM as well as imagines an expansive vision for social justice as a product of the projects undertaken by people in STEM fields. To set the stage for the book, then, we provide a brief overview of what the research literature does say about queer and trans people in STEM, with a focus on where this book closes existing gaps.

What We “Know”

One of the primary purposes of this chapter is to provide a brief, but comprehensive, summary of the existing research on LGBTQ+ people in STEM. We placed the word “know” in quotation marks, though, because the research literature is not the only source of knowledge on the experiences of queer and trans people in STEM. Queer and trans people have always existed in STEM fields and they hold a great deal of experiential knowledge accumulated and transmitted over the years. Yet up until 2009, no empirical research had been disseminated on the experiences of being LGBTQ+ in STEM, though not for reasons of neutrality or disinterest. Silence around sexual orientation in professional settings should be interpreted as a “negative space” around how readily heterosexual and cisgender experiences are recognized and shared in spaces deemed “professional” (Ward & Winstanley, 2003). What we share about ourselves is “policed” by policies and practices that enforce professional conduct as well as social norms and expectations aroun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Foreword by Erin A. Cech
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. What Do We Know and Why Should We Support Queer and Trans People in STEM?
• Part I Queer Students: Where do I fit in STEM?
• Part II Queer Staff: How Can I Create Safe Spaces for Queer People in STEM?
• Part III Queer Faculty: How Can I Build Community for Queer People in STEM
• Part IV Queer Allies, Allyship, and Advocates: How Can I Support Queer People in STEM?
• Name Index
• Subject Index