Black Women’s Educational Experiences in Canadian Post-Secondary Physics and Astronomy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is little research that provides insight into Black women’s experiences in Canadian physicsand astronomy. The purpose of this study is to complicate notions of access within the physics and astronomy educational landscape by drawing on the lived experiences of Black women in Canada. The research question—what are Black women’s educational experiences in post- secondary physics and astronomy?—aims to determine how Black women navigate predominantly White, male learning environments, while also negotiating their own positioning. Black feminist theorizing (Collins, 2002; Wane & Massaquoi, 2007) and Black feminist qualitative research methods (Evans-Winters, 2019) center this study to attend to Black women’s race, gender, and class, as they experienced post-secondary education in Canadian institutions. I used narrative methods (Clandinin & Caine, 2008) to conduct semi-structured interviews of six Black women with graduate experiences in physics and astronomy. I analyzed the data using inductive mapping, as described by Bhattacharya (2017), to identify themes. Major thematic findings showed that: a) Black women demonstrated persistence and perseverance throughout their educational journeys, b) respondents were mobilized by their passion and sense of purpose to facilitate goal attainment, c) women resisted misrepresentations to sustain their educational trajectories, and d) respondents’ recognition of oppression led to the rupture of norms in physics and astronomy education. This study’s significance lies in the consistent experiences of racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination that respondents shared, years apart and within different Canadian institutions. Any claim for equity and inclusion in the discipline is belied by the experiences of oppression and exclusion outlined in this study’s findings. Black women’s ongoing need to respond to discrimination added to the work of being a physicist or astronomer, therefore recommendations from this study implore stake holders in Canadian physics and astronomy (provosts, deans, department leadership, physics and astronomy faculties, supervisors, and student leadership) to implement anti-oppression initiatives to develop systems of change in Canadian physics and astronomy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".