Beyond Inquiry: Towards the Specificity of Anti-Blackness Studies in STEM Education

This article explores the concept of anti-blackness as a theoretical construct that may offer new openings towards transformative and liberatory projects concerned with race and inequity in STEM education research, policy, and pedagogical reform. The article first unpacks the historic, economic, political, and therefore racialized contexts of the ubiquitous bundle of STEM education reforms known as “inquiry.” Then, an overview of key theoretical constructs from Black Studies is provided, along with a more specific overview of how the framing ideas of BlackCrit (Dumas and Ross 2016) allow for more incisive examinations of anti-blackness in school contexts. Through the illustrative example of inquiry, the author shows how a BlackCrit analytic of anti-blackness might reframe inquiry in STEM as an anti-black construct. Implications related to the teaching and learning of STEM are discussed. © 2018, Ontario Institute for Educational Studies (OISE).