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In STEM education, grit is increasingly the focus of research, with scholars and educators seeking to develop and test interventions that will enhance persistence. As part of the special issue Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, in this paper, we use interviews with 12 white physics faculty to show that physics culture has taken up the narrative that grit is key to success in the discipline. Using affective technology (Zembylas and Leonardo, 2013), habitus (Bourdieu, 1972/1977) and emotional habitus (Gould et al. 2019) as theoretical anchors, our analysis shows that grit, as described by faculty participants, is part‐and‐parcel of awhite physics habitus. In other words, grit acts to reproduce systems of dominance through the internalization of a set of structures, symbols, and worldviews that produce embodied, affective responses, drawing dominant actors toward particular embodiments of hard work and turning them away from others. Thus, we argue that power in physics is mediated through affect and embodiment. Employing qualitative case study methods, we theorize how whiteness, in part, is reproduced in the discipline—how physics came to and continues to be a discipline where power is concentrated in the bodies of white males. We end by joining with existing calls to refuse grit, building from the work of STEM Scholars of Color who have called attention to the suffering that is endemic to notions of schooling and school science.
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This content will become publicly available on July 22, 2026
Physics Expertise as White Property: Entanglements Between Whiteness and Physics
In this paper, we use case study analysis of interviews with twelve white physics faculty to claim that physics expertise functions as white property, drawing on Harris’ definition of property as “every thing to which a [person] may attach a value and have a right” (Madison, 1906, as cited in Harris 1993, p. 1726). In particular, we use quotes from interviews to illustrate that physics expertise confers benefits to its holders, is jealously guarded, and is structurally protected. Faculty treat expertise as a marker of epistemic superiority in a discipline that is rooted in ideals of objectivity and neutrality, and they enforce contingencies around who can become a physicist, drawing on narratives that rely on those ideals. This argument has implications for a more just physics—one that divests from the property interest in physics expertise and invests in what Harris has called distributive justice, which centers a right to inclusion over a right to exclude.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2201929
- PAR ID:
- 10626947
- Publisher / Repository:
- Science Education
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Education
- ISSN:
- 0036-8326
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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