Affective Hierarchies: How Post-Brown Science Education Reforms Reinscribed Emotional Regimes

• In Event: The Fight for Racial Justice in STEM Education: Perspectives From the Field

Abstract

Attending to the affect of minoritized students now appears crucial to promoting equitable science education; however, this aim has a history—one predating equity reforms. This study historicizes how U.S. science classrooms became sites of affective intervention aimed especially at Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and Indigenous students. Analysis of U.S. science education research journals and curricular materials between the 1954 Brown ruling and a 1989 equity report suggests post-Brown reforms established differential emotional regimes for science learners classified as ‘culturally deprived’ versus ‘gifted.’ The analysis examines how such reforms evaded questions of racism, while reinscribing affective hierarchies with racializing effects. The paper explores implications for dismantling racial injustice by spotlighting the normalizing and depoliticizing effects of well-intentioned affect-centered reforms.

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison