STEM Histories: Complicating Dominant (Object-Oriented) Narratives

Abstract

This chapter suggests that oral history archives can help to (re)orient science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students’ ways of knowing, inviting them to look at disciplinary knowledge through a lens of the human experience as opposed to seeing primarily, or even exclusively, through the lens of objective truths. Oral histories can elucidate for STEM students the influence of a scientist’s positionality on scientific findings, the process and not just the products of STEM discovery, and the agency one has to shape social realities.