About Our Research
Black epiSTEMologies is a collaborative research project titled, “Examining Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education through a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens”. Black epiSTEMologies represent STEM education scholars from the University of Illinois Chicago, Tennessee State University, University of Texas-Austin, Georgia State University, North Carolina A&T State University, and American University. This will ensure our data analysis accounts for the vast heterogeneity of Blackness in the US and North America more broadly.
Our project contributes to racial equity by enhancing knowledge on the various meanings of being Black undergraduate students in STEM, nuancing the field’s conceptions and treatment of Blackness in relation to STEM engagement and Black undergraduates’ ideas of racial equity.
Black epiSTEMologies hope to examine how Blackness, the ways in which an individual demonstrates or performs their racial identity, may vary for Black undergraduate students given differences in a person’s ethnic identity, generational status to the United States, geographic location, socioeconomic status, gender, and/or other pertinent identity markers. This means that we hope to distinguish the various ways that Black people know, understand, and engage life because of differences in our backgrounds, values, and belief systems.
Achieving racial equity for Black undergraduate students in STEM requires understanding the complexity of Blackness, Black students’ varying needs, and their ideas about racial equity. Simply put, you cannot design and implement racial equity endeavors in postsecondary STEM unless you know what racial equity means to Black students. To disrupt systemic anti-Black racism and mitigate the myriad long-lasting effects of white supremacist ideologies of Black people within postsecondary STEM education in the United States (McGee, 2020a; Sheth, 2019), researchers must create and advance knowledge that fosters racial equity and inclusive STEM environments that leverage multidimensional-multiplicative perspectives of Blackness.
Taken together, the products generated by this Collaborative Research-Racial Equity (CRRE) project will advance the science and promotion of racial equity in STEM by expanding the array of Black epistemologies, perspectives, and experiences in STEM. This process occurs through nuancing conceptions of Blackness in relation to their STEM achievement and desires for racial equity. Our study is a national, mixed methods research study that examines how Black undergraduate students majoring in a Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, or other NSF approved STEM disciplines defines what it means to be Black within their STEM spaces. As such, this research study will recruit undergraduate students enrolled in four-year degree seeking institutions who either intend to major in STEM or are currently declared STEM majors.
