2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Given the current state of the US with respect to anti-trans backlash and erasure as well as worsening anti-neurodivergent rhetoric, it is more important than ever that engineering education researchers challenge oversimplified conceptualizations of gender and disability/non-disability that further ostracize trans and neurodivergent people. Yet, despite repeated calls for change in approaches to gender, engineering education researchers continue to rely on oversimplified, binary, and cis-normative conceptualizations of gender that tacitly deny the existence of transgender and/or nonbinary people. With respect to disability, much of the scholarship in EER to date has focused on disabled people only as ‘customers’ for engineering projects, ignoring the potential for engineering professionals, students, and/or educators to be disabled and thus rendering them/us unrecognizable in the current dominant paradigm. This erasure may be most obvious for neurodivergent engineers, given the normative assumptions about neurocognition embedded in the educational context. Though neurodiversity is a growing area of interest in EER, the field remains limited in both quantity of works and depth of theorization.
Thus, neuroqueer theory, which exists at the intersection(s) of gender, sexuality, disability, and neurodiversity, presents a potential path for addressing several areas of theoretical limitation within EER at once. Neuroqueer theory can especially enrich existing work on embodiment and on disabled/neurodivergent and/or queer/trans experiences in engineering and engineering education. At the same time, the field exhibits problematic trends that may limit the potential of neuroqueer theory to meaningfully affect change.