Toward an Ethic of Queerness for Engineering Education Research

This dissertation features three pieces of scholarship which showcase and demonstrate an ethic of queerness for engineering education research (EER). The concept of an ethic of queerness is introduced and constructed in Chapter 1 using tenets from the philosophy of pragmatism, systems thinking, critical theory, and the personal and collective experiences of queered communities immersed in normative spaces, such as engineering and engineering education. Chapter 2 is a scoping literature review on the state of research on the LGBTQIA+ engineering student experience compared to other relevant fields, revealing that EER is still nascent on the topic. Chapter 3 leverages arts-based qualitative inquiry to explore the opportunities and limitations of mixed-initiative creative interfaces (MICIs) when used as a tool for self care by queer(ed) subjects. Chapter 4 connects Patricia Hill Collins’ insider/outsider paradox framework to recent engineering education research through collaborative autoethnographies, illuminating the ways in which normative, oppressive social discourses are embedded within the EER system. Although Chapters 2-4 feature their own unique methodology and topic of inquiry, they are united through a motivation to deconstruct and re-imagine sociotechnical systems throughout engineering and EER through the lens of radical queerness. Chapter 5 summarizes how each of the prior chapters aligns with queerness as an ethic and explores avenues of future work from this dissertation. More specifically, each chapter represents a way of queering engineering education research methodology through the embrace of ambiguity and ephemerality, particularly with regard to the ways in which the author’s subjectivity and relationality to the roles of researcher, student, engineer, and engineering education researcher emerged throughout their doctoral education.