Reorienting Toward LGBTQ plus Belonging in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics by Feeling and Thinking With a Queer and Nonbinary Person in Virtual Reality

As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this paper analyzes participants' experiences playing an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience that explores gender and sexuality-based marginalization in STEM fields. The VR experience, designed and developed by the author and collaborators, addresses cisheteronormative ideologies embedded in science education by reimagining traditional STEM objects in queer representational forms while engaging players in a branching narrative dialog about gender and sexuality-based oppression. My findings include three in-depth analyses of participants' moment-to-moment interactions while playing the VR application. I argue that extending queer phenomenological approaches in education through the complimentary combination of ideological stance-taking and emotional configurations can highlight how people become reoriented toward solidarity with marginalized people in moment-to-moment interactions. I focus my analysis on how participants' emotions, elicited by the VR experience, became the pivot for their ideological reorientations in solidarity with the VR narrator. In particular, the VR stories and research excerpts I have shared give concrete examples of how LGBTQ+ people are harmed in STEM learning environments. The analysis reveals how participants made choices in the branching narrative that showed emotional configurations of care toward the marginalized VR narrator and demonstrated recognition of how sociopolitical/socioscientific systems fail LGBTQ+ people. Further, I argue how designing learning environments that reorient learners toward social justice and solidarity with marginalized people could be productively used to engage people in challenging dominant cisheteronormative framings embedded in STEM education.