Background Research regarding international female engineering graduate students tends to be aggregated with that about the experiences of international students in the United States or as the struggles of female engineers in engineering disciplines. Therefore, this study was conducted to understand the unique experiences of international female students in U.S. engineering graduate programs.Purpose/Hypothesis This study examined the theoretical intersections of sustainability and liminality in the experiences of international female graduate students in U.S. engineering programs. The study explored the tensions and challenges faced by international female engineering students in navigating engineering graduate programs.Design/Method Using qualitative detailed interviews and focus groups conducted with 49 participants, I explored the ways international female engineering students understood the tensions they experienced and developed strategies of persistence in responding to their liminal status within the engineering graduate programs.Results Three themes on the practices of sustainability in navigating liminality emerged from the data: constructing inclusion, challenging invisibility, and reengineering professional efficacy. The themes reflect the everyday strategies of survival the students participate in amid the challenging environment of the academic organizations.Conclusions International female engineers in U.S. graduate engineering programs exist in liminal spaces where their identities are continually being challenged. Through reconstructing inclusion, challenging their invisibility, and reengineering professional efficacy, they transform these liminal spaces to their advantage and persist in their struggles with the challenges they experience.Keywords gender; engineering; sustainability
IntroductionRetention of minorities has emerged as a key issue in the field of graduate engineering education. Unlike other disciplines, engineering has always occupied a central position in the debate about recruitment and retention practices, especially for women because of the gendered barriers they face (Tonso, 2006a(Tonso, , 2007. Engineering programs and schools are typically gendered, and their institutional practices are masculine (Bergvall et al., 1994). Ingram and Parker (2002) noted the barriers faced by women in U.S. engineering programs, where women are unable to fit
Journal of Engineering EducationV C 2015 ASEE.
Hegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access for and empowering the margins through data exchanged on the global free market, hegemonic Open Science processes co-opt and erase Southern epistemologies, working to create and reproduce new enclosures of extraction that serve data colonialism-capitalism. In this essay, drawing on our ongoing negotiations of community-led culture-centered advocacy and activist strategies that resist the racist, gendered, and classed structures of neocolonial knowledge production in the metropole in the North, we attend to Southern practices of Openness that radically disrupt the whiteness of hegemonic Open Science. These decolonizing practices foreground data sovereignty, community ownership, and public ownership of knowledge resources as the bases of resistance to the colonial-capitalist interests of hegemonic Open Science.
The study explores how women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers in Singapore discursively construct leadership. Drawing from 42 in-depth interviews with women in STEM careers, the study examines women's discourses of leadership, articulating patriarchal sociocultural and organizational norms that serve as barriers to women's access to leadership positions in STEM. The analysis elucidates the negotiations of workhome pressures shaped by patriarchal gender roles, culturally constituted organizational perceptions of women and their leadership potential, and gendered discourses of leadership as the key themes reflecting the experiences with and understandings of leadership among women in STEM. Particularly salient are the double binds that women experience, reflecting, for instance, Asian cultural norms about gendered performance that foreground women's roles in face saving and discourses of leadership that call for aggressiveness. Moreover, women experience gendered stereotypes about their content-based competence in STEM areas, further impeding the opportunities available for them to lead in STEM careers.
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