Pathways to STEM: Understanding Identity of Adult Physicists through Narrative Analysis

Abstract

In order to characterize how individuals make sense of their physics and racial identities and intersections of these identities, four university graduate students were interviewed about their own pathways into the field. To analyze these interviews, we utilize a narrative inquiry process combined with Nasir's (2011) framework of racialized identity resources. These interviews are analyzed in a two-step process: 1) to understand how participants make sense of their journey into physics, and 2) to investigate how their stories connect to race and gender. We find that the way these graduates talk about their pathways draws from common discourses around race and gender in STEM and provides information about what resources were most influential along their way.