Toward Black Feminist Geoscience Education: Centering Black Women’s Experiences in Postsecondary Geoscience

Abstract

This dissertation centers Black women in postsecondary geoscience education. We investigate a variety of topics including natural resources, storms, pollution, earth’s changing climate, and even the time and location of the origin of humanity. While Black women are underrepresented among PhD’s conferred in almost all stem fields (NCSES, 2025), the geosciences have been the most demographically homogeneous of all STEM fields for more than 50 years (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018). The geosciences thus represent an acute case of demographic minoritization among STEM fields. While studies centering singular axes of identity (i.e.: race or gender), peer reviewed empirical studies concerning Black Women's postsecondary educational experiences in the geosciences are limited. This absence in the literature reflects demographic trends within geoscience education but is also related to epistemological (what counts as valid ways of knowing) as well as methodological choices within peer reviewed literature. Through my three paper dissertation, I establish the need for intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991; i.e.: centering both race and gender) Black feminist (Collins, 2022) approaches in geoscience education, offer a framework for Black feminist praxis through research, pedagogical, and programmatic initiatives, and advance empirical examples of research that centers Black women. Each of the three papers are an exploration of discipline specific marginalization within the geosciences toward increased equity in the field. Together they posit that Black Feminist pedagogies are paramount for Black women’s persistence in the geosciences fields. The interdisciplinary nature of the geosciences suggest that insights from this research, concerning the discipline specific nature of marginalization, have potential for board applicability across STEM fields.