Interrogating Physics Education's Complicity in Neoliberalization to Disrupt Systems of Oppression in STEM Higher Education (Poster 7)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Fourteen
  In Poster Session: STEM Contexts and Organizational Culture Change

Abstract

As an economic theory, neoliberalism prioritizes individual contribution to market-based economies–philosophies that, when adopted by postsecondary and STEM education, contribute to the minoritization of Communities of Color, LGBTQ+ populations, and other systemically minoritized identity groups. As a growing academic discipline with its own histories of inequity and exclusion, physics education has been the origin point of educational initiatives built to respond to systemic injustice. If these initiatives are themselves complicit in neoliberalism, however, how effective are they at curtailing inequity? This theoretical paper analyzes several initiatives with origins in postsecondary physics education to explore how physics education is complicit in its own neoliberalization, arguing that these neoliberal initiatives ultimately exacerbate systems of domination and inequity.

Authors

• Justin Andrew Gutzwa, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Madison Swirtz, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author

• Evan LaForge
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ramon Barthelemy, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author