Intersectional research: Stories of successes in STEM among British south Asian women

Join ARU's Centre for Education Research on Identities and Inequalities (CERII) online to hear from guest speakers Saima Salehjee and Mike Watts about the use of intersectionality as an approach among UK-based STEM education researchers, specifically south Asian women.

Intersectionality has become an influential theoretical and methodological approach among UK-based STEM education researchers, grounding their work on the social justice and inequity debates and practices in underrepresented communities by showcasing the how and why of the aggregation of multiple interlacing social factors, such as gender, ethnicity, class and religion, resulting in oppressions, barriers and obstacles for minority ethnic young girls living in the UK (e.g., Dawson et al., 2020).

Saima and Mike re-consider intersectionality (Salehjee & Watts, 2022; 2023) in mainly two ways. First, though, like others, they ground their work to support the (in)equity debates, they use intersectionality to drive down from the generalities of the sociological to the ethnographies and particularities of the personal – referring to ‘intersectionality as personal’. Therefore, the multiple interlacing of social factors is personally experienced, unique and subjective.

Second, they spotlight minority ethnic women’s – in this case, south Asian women's – self-perceived and self-measured ‘successes’ to dismantle the tagging that all minority ethnic women are oppressed, and permanently disadvantaged.

Using intersectionality in this way requires Saima and Mike to keep the intersectionality tradition of presenting lived experiences as personal and successful experiences, which they refer to as successes in ‘STEM lives’. Their empirical intersectional data considers the nature of stories and how we ‘story’ other people’s accounts through an ‘entre-deux’ stance. They develop issues of pedagogy and consider what might be a ‘Pedagogy for Success’, and what this can offer the participants in their research.

Speakers

Saima Salehjee

Saima Salehjee is a Senior Lecturer of Education at the University of Glasgow. She is responsible for teaching (mainly science education and social research methods) and supervising undergraduate and postgraduate research students within the School of Social and Environmental Sustainability.

Her publications focus on science literacy, pedagogy, intersectionality, the culture of science, science identity, and identity transformations over a lifespan of individuals from different ethnic, religious, and sexual backgrounds.

She is a co-convenor of the British Educational Research Association (BERA)'s Race, Ethnicity and Education Special Interest Group and organises training sessions for staff and students on Anti-Racism practices in educational institutions.

Mike Watts

Mike Watts is Professor of Education in the Department of Education at Brunel University London. He conducts ‘naturalistic’ people-orientated research principally in science education, public understanding of science, and in scholarship in higher education.

He has conducted major studies in both formal and informal educational settings in the UK and abroad, and has published widely through numerous books, journal articles and conference papers.

He leads in the Department on Knowledge Transfer and Knowledge Exchange, enjoys exploring new technologies for learning, and writing about creative (sometimes transgressive!) pedagogical approaches to learning and teaching. He teaches at all levels within the Department of Education and currently supervises nine PhD students.