About the NSF-funded Faculty Epistemic Exclusion
Projects
Although there is increasing recognition that diversity among STEM faculty can lead to a number of desirable outcomes for student learning, scholarly knowledge production, and innovation, efforts to recruit and retain more women and faculty of color have had limited success. Through its ongoing projects, the WE2 team seeks to determine whether epistemic exclusion, a form a scholarly devaluation, may create a barrier to the full inclusion and participation of women and faculty of color in STEM.
To examine this novel form of workplace mistreatment, our first NSF-funded study aimed to develop and validate a scale to assess epistemic exclusion among faculty in STEM. Now that our first study is complete and a scale has been created, we are launching a second NSF-funded study aimed at examining how experiences of epistemic exclusion may vary based on scholars' identities, the consequences of epistemic exclusion for faculty careers, and how the consequences of epistemic exclusion vary based on scholars' identities. We anticipate this research will provide the groundwork for the development of targeted interventions addressing the unstated values built into systems of evaluation that have a disparate negative impact on certain groups of scholars.