Fighting for Desired Versions of a Future Self: Young African American Women's STEM-related Identity Negotiations in High School

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how the national narrative of increasing opportunities for and broadening participation of young women of color in STEM was taken up locally at one racially-diverse, urban high school. Using ethnographic and longitudinal data, we focus on two young women of color as they negotiated and maintained STEM-related identities in the discursive and practice contexts of their lives at school. Using Holland and Lave’s concept of history-in-person (2001), we view the young women as fighting for particular versions of a future self, while entangled in discursive and social relations that threatened to position them differently than they wished to be. Our findings suggest a need for an explicit naming and examination of the “double bind” that young women of color experience as they move through school environments and special support to prepare them for the challenges they may face in STEM-related college programs or workplaces.