LGBTQ+ students face hostile climates in engineering, yet few studies explore interventions that support queer student success. This interview study examines how participation in LGBTQ+ engineering reading groups helped 11 students develop queer cultural capital to navigate engineering. We demonstrate that through their development of queered forms of cultural capital including linguistic, familial, aspirational, navigational, and resistant capital, participants also developed emergent transgressive capital to move beyond boundaries and reject binaries. The reading group itself was created as a transgressive counterspace within a college of engineering and was structured to eliminate power differentials between undergraduates, graduate students and faculty. Participants rejected binaries in their use of pronouns and descriptions of their gender and sexual identities. Students credited the reading group for helping them realize there are other queer people succeeding in engineering. The reading group strengthened some participants’ queer identities, prompting them to be out to more people, including listing the group on their resume for potential employers to see. Participants were inspired by the nonbinary faculty member leading the group and the authors whose work they read. Overall, the reading group allowed students to reframe their daily realities in engineering and imagine how they might make change in the future.

This manuscript presents the results of a critical discourse analysis designed to investigate how legislators and other actors leverage discursive strategies to frame the need for/impacts of state-...

A group blog on constitutional law, theory, and politics

This is largely preaching to the choir. But it’s absent enough from...

Michelle Deutchman, who leads UC’s free expression center, says institutions are grappling with how to promote student expression amid the government’s crackdown on protesters.

Experience our interactive, profoundly engaging digital publication!

The Trump administration wants to eliminate the federally funded student support program. That could be devastating for low-income students and the institutions that serve them.

Bias response teams (BRTs) have proliferated in colleges and universities as administrative mechanisms to respond to hate and bias incidents on campuses. Advoca...

While colleges duck and cover, their employees feel angry and abandoned.

The statement marks college presidents’ largest collective rebuke of the White House’s actions to date.

Bias response teams (BRTs) have proliferated in colleges and universities as administrative mechanisms to respond to hate and bias incidents on campuses. Advoca...

As DEI bans take hold nationwide, interviews with Texas college students and employees offer some hints about what could be on the horizon for universities and students across the country.

Rural adult students’ intersectional identities inform many of their decisions about college, including the choice to transfer from a community college to a university. This qualitative study sough...

At least one school, East Carolina University, is scanning its curriculum for a list of keywords like “culture” in an effort to comply with anti-DEI orders.