Postdoctoral research fellows Kathryn Hosbein and Paulette Vincent-Ruz were among six teams from across the University of Michigan to be awarded grants from the National Center for Institutional Diversity’s (NCID) Anti-Racism Collaborative to support projects aiming to inform anti-racist action.
Hosbein, postdoc research fellow in Chemistry Education, and Vincent-Ruz, postdoc research fellow in the Physics Department, joined the Michigan Minds podcast to talk about receiving the grant and their project that the funding will support — “Supporting Border Crossing for Marginalized STEM Graduate Students Through Mentorships: The Reconciliation of Racial and STEM Identities.”
The objective of their project is to inform the understanding of how mentors can influence the development of STEM identity in racially marginalized graduate students.
“We’ve known for a long time that racially marginalized students leave STEM at a disproportionate rate and various fields have been working on this issue for decades, but we still have a long way to go. Our study focuses on two areas that have been shown to support the persistence of racially marginalized students, these being science identity and supportive mentorship,” Hosbein says, continuing to explain that science identity is the extent to which someone sees themself as a science person, and in this case they are focusing on STEM identity specifically.
“We want to understand the experiences of racially marginalized, graduate students — how their STEM identity has developed in graduate school — and the contributions that their mentor has had in this development. We’ll be specifically working with graduate students who report that their race or ethnicity is central to their identity, and asking how this identity has coexisted with their STEM identity throughout graduate school, and if and how their mentor has helped or hindered their experiences with border crossing, which put simply is the navigation between these two identities,” Hosbein says.
Their project also aims to highlight settler expectations of STEM identities and look for ways in which students are supported by their mentors in epistemological border crossing. Vincent-Ruz describes this as taking the original meaning of the phrase, coined by Gloria Anzaldúa to explain her identity as a Mexican American woman, and bringing it into science identities, as Megan Bang of Northwestern University has done, she notes.
“What happens is, the settler expectations are, what do we think a scientist should be? This is often a very cis white male’s perspective even though the makeup of science has changed a little, we’re still expected to have certain behaviors.
“So the importance of highlighting the status quo is [there] because we’re centralizing the tension we’re putting on marginalized students to change. Really what we are trying to say is, ‘This is not about making students change to fit this box that we have created. This is about showing you why this box is harmful. It’s hurting development, it’s not allowing them to be their full selves, and why expanding the meanings of this box matters.’ I want to be very clear that this is not about us helping students assimilate into science. We’re focusing on the status quo to first highlight how we’re hurting marginalized students, and then we can figure out ways to support mentors to break this tension,” she says.
They also detail how the Anti-Racism Collaborative contributions will support their research objectives, and how enthusiastic they are to be a part of the first cohort of teams to receive the award.
“We’re incredibly excited that these grants even exist, that the Anti-Racism Collaborative is there. We’ve never questioned the importance of this project and are so grateful that the university recognized its potential. But second, it’s literally unbelievable to be a part of this list,” Hosbein says.
Listen to the full episode
Learn more about this project and the other projects funded by the Anti-Racism Collaborative
