Queered Science: Why Social Justice and STEM Fields Should Hang Out More Often
Why this article is worthwhile…
Social justice and STEM education are not two phrases that most people associate. It is for this exact reason that this article caught my attention and I simply had to include it in my curricular resources. After all, part of queering anything is to challenge the notion of what is natural versus unnatural and to make the unnatural natural, and vice versa.
What I also appreciate about this article is the fact that it does not speak specifically to science (the “S”) but to STEM as a collective field rather than discrete specialties and subspecialties. (An aside: I believe science education could take greater strides to become more interdisciplinary. While I understand that specific divisions (i.e. biology, chemistry, physics) make the teacher certification process more manageable, have these subject categories limits thinking and making connections across subjects. As a former biology and chemistry teacher, I have had students come to chemistry class having forgotten 95% of the biology they learned the previous year, only to recall the subject when they take AP biology. Deconstructing the boundaries between these disciplines might be something worthwhile pursuing…)
Coming back to the article… I would like to share a few excerpts from the article, for they illuminate the reasons I am including it as a resource:
Sciences are perceived as an objective, neutral place. Who you are, and what you identify with, aren’t supposed to matter in whether people think you can do science — and yet it absolutely does. There is a consistent underrepresentation of minorities of every type, and it’s often difficult to understand why from the outset. I’m interested in how inequality is a really subtle process, and how we can reproduce inequalities without noticing that’s what’s going on.
The way we construct this idea of having a career or a major or a path and how it’s a way of expressing oneself, is such a dominant cultural narrative. It’s a very common frame through which people choose a major, that what you pick is somehow expressing who you are. And in this way it might mask subtle gendered processes: people’s interests come to be gendered, and that then becomes who they think they are. It feels legitimate and organic to them, and in many ways it is. But when people make decisions as a result of these expressive choices, the societal gendering of those choices comes into play. These choices are part personal choice, but a focus on choice alone hides, or cloaks, the very important presence of this lifelong gendering process under the guise of self-expression.
-Dr. Erin Cech