STEM education research has repeatedly demonstrated how the STEM field is gendered masculine. But what does this mean? Is there anything about STEM subjects as such, that warrants labelling them masculine? This paper explores these questions through a meta-narrative, theoretical-critical review of previous review studies. The aim is to investigate how STEM subjects have been conceptualized as gendered in STEM education research, and what this means for feminist STEM educators who want to pluralize STEM education. Three ways of conceptualizing STEM subjects as gendered are identified: 1) The non-substantial association thesis; 2) The masculine epistemology of STEM; 3) STEM as difficult, asocial, and unhelpful. An over-arching finding is that most studies do not explore how STEM subjects emerge as gendered in the educational settings explored. Instead, gender is imported into the analysis in ways that are not always productive for educators who want to pluralize STEM education through educational measures.

This study examines the teaching of a student group that is often overlooked in research and policy: newly arrived adolescent students with limited previous experience of formal schooling (NALS). Drawing on ethnographic data produced at two junior high schools with different reception models for newly arrived students, we asked how NALS were approached at the schools. Employing the notion of difference blindness, the study shows that, at one of the schools, NALS were primarily approached as "weak" learners in general or as "weak" Swedish learners in particular. We argue that NALS are caught here in an "oscillation" between visibility as a group with particular needs on the one hand and invisibility resulting from difference blindness on the other. At the second school, a bilingual model was employed. Here, NALS pedagogical needs were to a higher extent tied to school subject knowledge. We demonstrate that when Swedish acquisition was not the primary goal of the educational practice, this enabled a pedagogy that was less "blind" to the needs of NALS.

We analyse how the whiteness of science and technology in Swedish universities is reproduced using four interviews with undergraduates involved in groups that work on making their courses more inclusive. Combining discourse analysis with a phenomenological focus on bodies, we begin with their nuanced understandings of gender inequality. We contrast these with their professions of ignorance about 'race' and racism and how they naturalise their ignorance. We explore how they create relations of proximity that 'other' students of colour and embed racialised distinctions within equalities work. We understand this within a broader colour evasiveness (an extension of colour blindness) in which whiteness is conflated with Swedishness.

During recent decades, geek culture has become increasingly visible, and the geek has left the cultural margins, becoming more popular than ever. At the same time, nostalgia has emerged as a central component of geek culture. Framed by a post-structural understanding of gender and race and drawing on cultural theorist Svetlana Boym's distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia, this article explores how and why geeks nostalgically long for a time when they were largely marginalized. We combine readings of Swedish online geek podcasts and YouTube channels with ethnographic visits to geek conferences and pop-cultural "geek fairs," such as Comic Con and SciFiWorld. We argue that geek nostalgia represents a clinging on to a "constitutive wound," allowing the geek figure to mobilize masculine victimhood in ways that simultaneously underpin geek privilege and allow the geek to continue operating as a white male gatekeeper of geek culture.

In this paper, we argue that the geek entrepreneur is a new hegemonic masculine formation superseding the macho formation exemplified by John Wayne and the global business masculinity proposed as hegemonic by Connell and Messerschmidt more recently. This formation fuses the technological genius and suffering of geekiness with the disruption and innovation of entrepreneurialism. It is the masculinity of the geek entrepreneur that today legitimates both male domination and capitalism. We construct this argument through looking in detail at two cinematic representations of the geek entrepreneur: Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and Tony Stark in Iron Man. We hope to open up a debate about how gendered discursive formations have changed since the 1980s, what masculinity is now hegemonic, and how this can illuminate gender and other power relations.

As 'open' and supposedly inclusive informal learning settings that participants visit out of interest and passion, there has been hope that makerspaces will democratize technology and challenge traditional gender patterns in engineering education. Passion for technology has, however, also been shown to be deeply intertwined with the masculinization of engineering. This article explores how this tension manifests among engineering students and other makers at an 'open' voluntaristically-organized technology makerspace located at the campus of a Swedish university of technology. It draws on a post-structural understanding of gender and Sara Ahmed's queer-phenomenological conceptualization of emotions as 'orienting devices'. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with makers, we show how passion for technology is articulated as a particularly absorbing emotion that underpins a playful approach to technology and a framing of makers as single-minded and asocial. We demonstrate how passion for technology thereby becomes a homosocial 'glue' that makes technology 'sticky' for only a select group of techno-passionate men. We conclude that this undermines the potential for 'making' to democratize technology and puts into question the degree to which interest-driven, voluntaristic and 'authentic' settings for engaging with technology can contribute to pluralizing engineering.

Physics- and computer-related disciplines are strongly male dominated in Western higher education. Feminist research has demonstrated how this can be understood as reflecting a strong privileging of mind and rationality (over body/nature/emotions) in these disciplines, which harmonises with broader notions of masculinity as transcendental and disembodied. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, being recognised as legitimate in these fields is also tightly connected to embodiment. Drawing on post-structural gender theory, we explore how notions of corporeality, style and aesthetics are articulated within computer engineering and physics settings at two higher education institutions, one in Canada, one in Sweden. Using empirical data from two case studies, we demonstrate that these disciplines are usually understood as 'gender neutral' by students but that interest and competence in these fields are simultaneously understood as embodied through neglect for style and corporeal aesthetics, in ways that contribute to the masculinisation of these fields.

A diverse body of feminist scholarship has addressed the masculine orientation of Western engineering education for at least four decades. Among critiques specifically targeting curriculum, a recurrent line of argumentation highlights its reductionist framing and narrow focus on mathematics and technology. The argument is that these traits represent a masculine orientation and that women would gain from a curriculum more oriented towards the context and applicability of technical knowledge. Simultaneously, researchers working in a Bernsteinian, social realist, educational tradition have suggested that, from a social-class perspective, it is important to provide all students with access to theoretical, abstract and context-independent knowledge. This article explores the resultant, theoretical tension between these two positions. Our empirical starting point is a recently completed ethnographic study of a male-dominated bachelor's degree engineering program in Sweden. This program's curriculum repeatedly emphasizes the value of experiential and contextually rooted knowledge over contextless and mathematically modeled knowledge. Borrowing Bernstein's terminology, we argue that such emphasis represents a privileging of horizontal discourse over vertical and that, as such, said curriculum potentially deprives the male, working-class students of access to powerful knowledge. We further highlight how the program represents a poor target for the line of feminist critique identified above, despite being strongly male dominated. We thereby shed light on challenges related to formulating (intersectional) critiques of the engineering curriculum simultaneously attentive to both class and gender. Conclusively, we argue that efforts directed at making the engineering curriculum more inclusive can learn from both feminist and social realist lines of argumentation.

Located at the intersection of feminist science and technology studies and masculinity research, masculinity and technology research explores the often-neglected relationship between masculinity and technology. This chapter maps developments in this cross-disciplinary field. The influential notion of coproduction of gender and technology is explicated, and the fruitfulness of this approach is illustrated by discussing the "case" of masculinity and digital technology. The theoretical and methodological challenges associated with the coproduction thesis are discussed, and contemporary attempts to address these are taken as point of departure for identifying promising new research directions and areas in need of theoretical refinement.

Social justice in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education : Establishing a platform for conversation

Hogre teknisk utbildning ar pa manga satt ett mansdominerat falt. Nar man i sarskilda rekryteringssatsningar, liksom i forskning om utbildning, genus och teknik, fragat sig vad det kan bero pa, har man ofta fokuserat pa kvinnor och implicit undrat: varfor sa fa? Den sjalvklarhet med vilken maskulinitet och teknik kopplas samman, och de normer som gor maskulint teknikintresse till nagot sjalvklart, tenderar da att trada i bakgrunden. I denna studie riktas dock intresset explicit mot sammanlankandet av maskulinitet och teknik. Sarskilt uppmarksammas hur forestallningar om kropp, passion, begar och heterosexualitet ar aktiva i upprattandet av sadana band. Genom etnografiska observationer och intervjuer med studenter pa tva tekniska hogskoleprogram, ett data- och ett kemitekniskt, studeras bade studentkultur och formell undervisning. Det pekas pa att manga studenter intar ett utpraglat instrumentellt forhallningssatt till sina studier. En tolkning ar att denna instrumentalitet fungerar pluraliserande i forhallande till kon, satillvida att positionen som instrumentell framtrader som relativt ’tom’, och inte implicerar sarskilt mycket om studenter som identifierar sig med den. Denna position ar sarskilt dominerande pa kemiteknikprogrammet. Aven datateknologerna i studien relaterar i hog grad instrumentellt till sina formella studier. Pa dataprogrammet formuleras dock samtidigt en forvantan om att studenter bortom studierna genomsyras av en passion for datorteknik. Denna passion ges utpraglat heteromaskulina konnotationer, inte minst genom hur den artikuleras i studentkulturen. I avhandlingen tolkas detta som ett skal till att datateknikprogrammet, i kontrast till kemiteknikprogrammet, framtrader som ett program med tydliga maskulina fortecken.

Rekryteringssatsningar med syfte att locka fler unga till teknisk utbildning ar ingen ny foreteelse. Undersoker man sadana satsningar narmare finner man snart stora likheter. Problembeskrivningarna ar ofta i det narmaste identiska och de losningar man skisserar likasa. Samtidigt tvivlar manga pa att det arbete som genomfors pa omradet ar effektivt.