Body? What Body? Considering Ability and Disability in STEM Disciplines

Abstract

Issues of minority inclusion in STEM fields, marking the presence or absence of certain groups in these disciplines, are often treated by analysts as "inside/outside" problems: some groups are included, some are not, we learn, and the resulting discrimination needs to be addressed by securing inclusion for the "missing" folk.That dichotomous understanding, however, hides the complicated marginalities within marginalities inhering in American science and technology sectors.The educators and policy makers who have worked to correct STEM underrepresentation are themselves often treated as outside the pedagogical mainstream; the rare historian or sociologist concerned with matters of identity and equity in science and technology is less explicable still to his or her home discipline.And as little explored as race, gender, and LGBT identity might be, physical ability and disability in STEM disciplines remain subjects with even less presence in social scientific spheres.This paper considers this absence: why do persons with disabilities constitute an identity that remains underexplored in STEM education theory, marginalized in institutional planning, and nearly invisible in critical social scientific studies of those fields, even where other forms of exclusion have come under study?What ideas about bodies and intellectual abilities and the linkages between them are foundational to STEM, and why have social scientists almost completely failed to consider these powerful cultural normativities?By extension, what might the methods of Science and Technology (or Engineering) Studies bring to such study?Do receptive audiences for such an inquiry exist?Using the case of a visually impaired undergraduate at a large state university who explicitly addressed the discriminatory epistemological suppositions of her lab course instructors, this paper will describe presumptions made about the student's abilities; about the nature of learning in STEM fields; and about precision and accuracy in scientific data as functions of some bodies and not others.Preparatory to a larger study of students with disabilities in laboratory settings, this paper asks, as well, if risks-either analytical or reputational--accrue to those personsdisabled or non-disabled--who undertake such analyses.

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