2023 Collaborative Network for Computing and Engineering Diversity (CoNECD)

The STEM glass ceilingan invisible barrier held in place by the bolts of capitalism, imperialism, xenophobia, and structural racism (Rahming et al., 2022)—is one that is incredibly hard to shatter and breakthrough. Black students in STEM in the U.S. face a range of challenges, from academic to social, that are often associated with one specific aspect of their identity: their race. Research highlights the fact that in U.S. society, the social construction of Blackness is one that creates a one-dimensional view of Black people, permitting the norm of flattening the dimensionality of identity by lumping Black people together as one and ignoring differences such as ethnicity and/or nationality (Mwangi et al., 2014; Mwangi et al., 2019). This failure to disaggregate the experiences of Blackness across dimensions of identities while simultaneously addressing the intersections of identities has resulted in a lack of comprehensive understanding of the experiences of Black students, and specifically, Black engineering graduate students. Studies have investigated this dimensionality in higher education, but not in engineering explicitly (Mwangi et al., 2014; Mwangi et al., 2019). As recent scholarship has revealed, ‘being Black’ has different positions of centrality with respect to people’s identities (Mobley et al., 2021). Given that a significant percentage of Black graduate students in engineering identify as being international, studies that approach Blackness monolithically will result in the generation of knowledge lacking complexity of the varied vantages that additional identities create. This derivative study of a larger participatory action research project involved 5 Actioners (our term for participants) in graduate-level programs across the U.S. Through an intentional focus on the central identity experiences for Black immigrant graduate students in engineering, we leveraged shared counterstories to learn how they engaged with racial and ethnic identities in their engineering pursuits. A Black immigrant, for this study, was defined as an individual who spent most of their formative years/childhood education in a predominantly Black country. Framed in racial and ethnic socialization theories, this work applied a critical lens through Actioner counternarrative sharing with the counternarratives serving as our primary source of data. We conducted a round of inductive coding followed by pattern coding to make meaning of the smaller units emergent in the data to identify relevant themes. Three themes emerged related to Black immigrant engineering graduate students’ engagement with racial and ethnic identity in navigating engineering environments: 1) Students equated their Blackness in engineering to be a ‘forced identity’ that they had not had to conceptualize outside of the United States; 2) Students benefitted from an unexpected armor that ‘shielded them from barriers’ provided in privileges of their having been educated external to the United States and in a predominantly Black country; and 3) Students revealed their greatest identity related challenge to be the partial access afforded them in the United States’ engineering enterprise as limited by their immigration status. Exploring ethnic socialization provides tremendous insight into what will otherwise remain unknown opportunities to support and improve the experiences of Black students from a comprehensive, multifaceted view that dispels monolithic Blackness.