Fellowship Start Date: August 1st 2024, Fellowship End Date: July 31st 2026

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STEM education research on inclusive environments and interdisciplinary STEM research is growing. As the field continues to reflect dynamic communities and community research priorities, this novel post-doctoral program seeks to bring to the center critical frameworks. Through a thematic of “Queering STEM Education” we propose to bring together a cohort of STEM education and science studies scholars who take seriously critical frameworks of queer, decolonial, transnational, and / or intersectionality. To queer is to offer a critique, to contest the “naturalization of the categories of normal and deviant sexuality and binarized notions of sexed anatomy, gender identity, sexual desire, and sexual identity” (Thinking with Kristina Gupta and David Rubin 2021). To bring to the center analytics that are historically on the margins of STEM research, is, so to speak, a queering endeavor. Therefore, to queer STEM is truly an interdisciplinary and methodological complex undertaking. That is, to queer is to contend with the norms with how one does research, the modalities of research, the subjects in research, and the research questions asked that further how we come to know what counts as STEM. As conveyed by Jin a queer methodology “only works if we know where we stand, where we are trying to go, and whom we are trying to take with us” (Haritworn 2017). As fields of STEM seek to diversify, it is ever more pressing through a cohort model of scholars that we also to take seriously how research is done, and how a next generation of scholars are supported and trained to cross disciplines.

Who Should Apply: This program will support the training of three postdoctoral fellows. Ideal candidates include individuals who graduated in the past 4 years, and whose research includes:

• Discipline-based education researchers (DBER) interested in queering their methodologies or bringing into their research queer analytics.
• Science studies scholars who bring into their research queer methods or frameworks.
• Interdisciplinary scholars who bring to the center of their research STEM related fields.