Hidden Figures on Perceptions of Engineering Using Arts-Based Research Methods Katherine A

Paper ID #34465

WIP Knowing Engineering Through the Arts: The Impact of the Film Hid- den Figures on Perceptions of Engineering Using Arts-Based Research Methods

Katherine Robert, University of Denver

Katherine is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver’s Morgridge School of Education in the higher education department. In her dissertation research, she uses arts-based research methods, new materialist theory, and is guided by culturally responsive methodological principles to collaborate with underrepresented engineering students to uncover their experiences of socialization into the professional engineering culture. Katherine is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist with an expansive career and academic history that she intends to utilize to help STEM organizations become more inclusive and equitable.

c American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Knowing engineering through the arts: The impact of the film Hidden Figures on perceptions of engineering using arts-based research methods Katherine A. Robert University of Denver Morgridge College of Education, Doctoral Candidate in Higher Education

Abstract

Despite decades of efforts, racial and gender diversity remains elusive for engineering education and the professions. Researchers in engineering education call for innovative research methodologies to increase diversity in engineering education. My unique new materialist and arts-based research project explores the intersections of race, gender, history, STEM education, and the arts, and is guided by the principles of culturally responsive methodologies. I use this work-in-progress to better understand how the film Hidden Figures affected the public’s understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and the professions. My purpose is to uncover and share additional hidden stories about Black women’s experiences in engineering education and the professions today, but also to demonstrate a different methodological framework that centers Black women’s voices and shifts how the lack of racial and gender diversity in engineering is perceived. I found that the film had a tremendous impact on women and girls of color by providing visible role models in STEM professions. Keywords Engineering education, diversity, Hidden Figures, arts-based research methods, new materialism, culturally responsive methodologies

Introduction

Despite decades of efforts, racial and gender diversity remains elusive for engineering education and the professions [1]. Researchers in engineering education call for innovative methodologies [2], [3] to examine the complicated historical and cultural entanglements related to increasing diversity in engineering education, which includes research method alternatives to the use of positivist frameworks that dominate engineering culture [4]. I answer this call with my unique critical qualitative and arts-based research project that explores the intersections of race, gender, history, culture, education, and the arts, which is guided by the principles of culturally responsive methodologies [5]. The idea for my study arose during my higher education doctoral dissertation proposal research on diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) in engineering education. I use this work-in-progress to better understand how the film Hidden Figures affected the public’s understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and the professions, including my own perspectives as a White woman. My purpose is to uncover and share additional hidden stories about women, and particularly Black women’s experiences in engineering education and the professions today, but also to demonstrate a different methodological framework that centers Black women’s voices and shifts how the lack of racial and gender diversity in engineering is perceived. The film Hidden Figures [6] tells the stories of three African American female mathematicians who worked at Langley in the space programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1960s. These women’s stories were unknown and untold until author Margot Lee Shetterly discovered that her Sunday school teacher was Katherine Johnson [7]. Johnson, along with Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, are the focus of the film, which is based on Shetterly’s book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race” [8]. While the book detailed the oppressive, racist culture of the civil rights context that all the Black women faced at Langley at the time, the film is geared toward entertainment for the broader public and shifts the racial stories [7]. I use three guiding research questions to map the borders of my inquiry:

• How do the arts influence participation in STEM higher education? • Specifically, how did Hidden Figures, the 2016 film about African American women’s experiences as engineers and mathematicians at the 1960s NASA space program, affect efforts to increase participation of girls and students from racially underrepresented communities in engineering? • How do engineering educators and the U.S public perceive and interpret new information about the history of discrimination in STEM fields? My findings indicate that the film had a tremendous impact on Black women in STEM, but also White women and other women of color by providing much needed visual models of success in STEM professions. I begin my paper with a review of some of the research literature to set up the context of my study, after which I explain my unique methodological framework and research design. In the last section, I discuss my analysis process and findings in more detail. I end with the limitations and the future iterations of this project. Literature Review The purpose of my literature review is to contextualize my inquiry about the impacts that the film Hidden Figures had on Black women and girls in STEM education and professions, but also how the broader American public perceives Black women’s contributions to STEM fields and education. I take an interdisciplinary approach to examining the research that aligns with my theoretical framework. I briefly show the history of racism and sexism in U.S. education and STEM while also reviewing research about the current cultural climate in STEM in relation to gender and racial identities. Next, I review the critical media research about portrayals of Black women and girls in relationship to STEM. I weave in film reviews and discussions about Hidden Figures when pertinent. I end with a short discussion about the use of different epistemological approaches to STEM research in the Black community to justify my use of arts-based research methods as culturally responsive. Historical Entanglements of Race and Gender in STEM Today The film chronicles the ways in which the patriotic contributions by the Black women working at Langley in the space program during the Cold War space race were excluded from history. The film includes the complicated ways that the characters’ race and gender identities intersected with the politics of the era. Today, women from all racial backgrounds have levels of participation in STEM education and professions that remains below their overall population in the U.S. [9]. And for women who enter STEM, contemporary education researchers documented the ways in which they continue to face discrimination in engineering education culture [10], [11], including the historical links that influence perceptions about technology, gender, and STEM participation today [12], [13]. Historically, gender concepts related to technology complicated stories about who is an engineer and scientist and what is considered legitimate technology and engineering practices [13]. The World’s Fairs in the early U.S. modern industrial era in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marginalized women as participants and inventors [14] and contributed to a gendering of engineering and technology as masculine spaces and activities [15]. Indeed, the emerging technology and science of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century were used to describe women’s physiology as deficient and inferior to men [16]. In the film, women who calculated mathematics were called computers, which both Black and White women performed as the task was deemed unskilled tedious labor that was beneath men [12], [13], [17]. Recent research [18], [19] documents the gendered culture of engineering education that remains chilly to women [20] and people of color [21], [22] today. In the film, the women confront barriers to career advancement based on their gender and race, despite their competency and skills. Contemporary empirical research also documents the way that gender is used today, often unwittingly, to designate some engineering fields, tasks, and roles as more masculine or feminine within a hierarchy [18]. Intersecting social identities [23] like age, gender, and race as well as academic and professional disciplines and degree attainment generate a hierarchy of power in STEM that is difficult to study due to the complex relationality between these various social identities [24]. This difficulty is increased when examined in relationship to the culture of engineering, which is apolitical, ahistorical, and locked in a positivist mindset that research finds often denies the space to acknowledge how different bodies experience engineering culture [11], [25]. However, higher education in general rests on limited understandings about the complex intersections of social identities and racialized conceptions about intelligence and ability that influence who is deemed “gifted” or “at risk” [26]. For women of color participating in STEM today, research shows that race is usually less salient in their experiences than their gender, while for men of color, race is more often cited as making them feel different in engineering education [27]. Students’ report that their own perceptions about their racial and gender identities are potential risks

to their attainment in higher education, but that these identities can also often empower them in their STEM education experiences. This empowerment includes Black female STEM students’ ability to self-author their own STEM identities and which of their intersecting identities are salient for themselves [28]. Research in higher education and STEM education shows that the barriers hidden in systemic racism are not in the past but are present today. These barriers are rooted in the history of denying Black men and women access to opportunities in higher education as faculty [29] and as students in STEM education that were unable to move into professional careers but were rather limited to the role of technicians [30]. Kendi’s [31] extensive history of racism in the U.S. clearly shows the centuries long legacy of White men and women not only devaluing and treating Black bodies and minds as inferior, but how the dynamics of systemic racism function to reproduce inequities and exclusions that remain hidden today. The form that racism takes changes over time [31], which contributes to it invisibility. Today STEM students of color experience microaggressions [32] that generates additional stress, alienation, and anxiety for these students [33], which the engineering education mental health research shows is in addition to already higher levels of mental stress in engineering education [34]. As Towns [35] argues, Black bodies are not seen as fully human in the U.S., including in the present political climate of racial tensions between Black Lives Matter movement and the rising threat of domestic terrorism from white supremacy [36]. These are the historical and contemporary entanglements with which we must examine Black student experiences related to engineering education and the professions, but also my ongoing analysis of the impact of the film Hidden Figures. The Paradox of Invisibility and Hyper-visibility The film and book title Hidden Figures metaphorically points toward how these women’s stories and contributions are absent from U.S. history, but the title also ties into the research findings about the experiences of Black women in STEM today. The research shows that Black women, but also other women of color, exist in a paradox of being both invisible and hyper-visible in STEM spaces [27]. Women of color are often invisible because of their underrepresentation in engineering education and the professions [37]. The research also shows that for many of these women, they also experience a form of hyper-visibility because they are the only woman of color in the room [27]. Thompson’s [7] discussion of the film locates Katherine Johnson’s experiences of invisibility in the racist hierarchy of the time, and her hyper-visibility as the only Black woman in many of the spaces she entered. In Carpenter’s [17] interview with the author of the book Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly, Shetterly reveals that she was unaware that her Sunday school teacher, mathematician Katherine Johnson of NASA, was part of this historical contribution. It was this shocking realization that there were so many women, Black and White, working at NASA and contributing to the space program that motivated Shetterly. Shetterly’s purpose was to correct U.S. history by showing that women historically and patriotically contributed to the computing, math, engineering, and science in the U.S. space program during the Cold War, though Shetterly acknowledges that the civil rights context of the book is not as pronounced in the film [17]. Contemporary research shows that the success that Black women and girls’ experience in STEM in part comes from having Black female role models and support networks. For young Black girls entering STEM, Black women STEM role models are needed who have intersectional leadership skills and visionary strategies that are based on their lived experiences of being Black women; they are role models because of their shared empathy for having multiple identities that face oppression in educational settings [38]. Research indicates that professional STEM conferences would benefit from increasing their support for Black women’s unique intersecting and nuanced experiences in STEM, while also making their contributions more visible [39]. Successful Black women who are professional engineers reported that they needed support at all levels during their education and professional experiences, from family and friends to teachers and professors [22]. In the workplace, these Black women engineers succeeded with mentors and support groups, managerial support, and peer groups where they could find empathy for their isolation, tokenism, and alienation [22]. For Black women seeking to join an organization but who are aware of being potentially stigmatized in predominately White settings, research shows that seeing oneself in a professional setting through images of other Black women is important and signals trust and belonging [40]. A contribution of the film is showing Black female leadership styles that can serve as models. Thompson [7] analyzed the styles of Black female leadership the characters displayed in the film by comparing the book to the film using racial and gender standpoints. Thompson argues that the film hides important parts of the story told in the book about the historical ongoing forms of resistance Black women have used in their constant generational experiences of racial and gender oppression and discrimination. Thompson [7] argues that the film shifted the content of the book toward entertainment to make the movie less threatening to White audiences [41] [42], which dilutes the agency of the women in their own stories. Research shows that efforts at diversity in higher education are often merely rhetorical and do not substantially alter student experiences [43]. Additionally, diversity efforts in higher education generally

[44] and in STEM education specifically [21] are often deficit focused. A deficit focus puts the emphasis for the lack of diversity on student shortcomings rather than examining the institutional racist norms that are often unseen by White people [42]. More support is needed from institutions for Black students [33], [45] but critical counternarratives about STEM are also needed that re-stories African American and women’s participation in STEM disciplines and professions and tells of their success and contributions [21]. Portrayals of Black women in film and media related to STEM are rare [7]. Research shows that women, regardless of race, are still stereotyped in media including in science advertisements [46]. In STEM related films, most female characters are White and often play marginal roles [47]. Increased and diverse portrayals of women, and especially women of color, affect girls’ identification with careers in STEM fields. Alicia Morgan, a Black female aerospace engineer [48], describes wishing she had experienced the film Hidden Figures to prepare her for the culture shock of her first job at Boeing after getting her engineering degree from Tuskegee University in 2001, which is a historically Black school. She too describes the paradoxical phenomena of invisibility and repeatedly being mistaken as a secretary, as well as the experience of hyper-visibility of being the only Black woman in her department [48]. Morgan works with non- profits to increase diversity and add the arts to STEM, or STEAM [49] and insists that many of the same issues remain, including a shortage of role models and mentors. A Unique Methodological Approach Research about diversity efforts in STEM education includes calls for more diversity in the research methods used that include interdisciplinary [2] and diverse epistemological approaches [50]. However, as Douglas, Koro- Ljungberg, and Borrego’s [51] research shows, engineering education organizations are not always equipped with scholars trained in disciplinary epistemological know-how outside STEM to evaluate different methodological approaches to research. That being said, arts-based research methods [52] have been used in STEM education research to help uncover first generation engineering students’ identities as engineers [53] and as a storytelling method [54] that increases the researcher’s understanding of their own research. Poetry was used by Kellam et al. [55] to understand in more complicated and nuanced ways how engineer identities form in students. These creative and culturally responsive methodologies [5] provide local and specific stories that are missed in quantitative approaches, thereby lending detailed understandings to student experiences. I use arts-based research (ABR) methods in this study that are guided by the principles of Berryman, SooHoo, and Nevin’s [5] culturally responsive methodologies (CRM). In this project CRM principles require that I center the voices of Black women, including research by Black women scholars, but also that I use methods that are culturally responsive to Black women. For the Black and African American cultural community, the arts, including poetry, narrative, and storytelling are epistemologically prized as a means of coming to know [56]. As examples, Oliver [57] combines arts-based narrative inquiry, hip-hop culture, and critical race theory to understand students experiences more deeply. This framework the author created is called critical hip hop storytelling and is a unique arts-based framework for racial minority students, educators, and researchers to explore their own experiences. Similarly, Davis [58] combines the hip-hop aesthetic of sampling, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory to form a culturally responsive method that allows minoritized participants in research to protest and create counternarratives. Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis [59] use a genre called social science portraiture that blurs disciplinary boundaries and aims to illuminate the complexity in human lives and institutions in their cultural contexts. The authors share an example of a narrative portrait of an arts center that served as a haven for African American children in a low-income neighborhood. In summary, I have shown the complex historical, political, and cultural barriers that women and Black women in particular face in higher education and specifically in STEM education. Additionally, I showed the importance of role models and mentors for Black women in STEM, but also the dearth of visual portrayals in films and media related to STEM. Lastly, I showed the nexus of engineering diversity researchers’ desire for different methodological approaches to research with the importance of the arts to the Black and African American cultural communities as a culturally responsive means of coming to know. Methodology In this section, I explain my use of a new materialist theory and how it fits with my use of arts-based methods in my research design that explores the intersection of educational diversity efforts, the arts, and engineering history. My unique framework requires some explanation to communicate across disciplinary understandings about how knowledge is generated [3], [4]. For example, in my methods section below, I describe my literature and image search methods because my framework does not differentiate distinct phases of the research; rather, I acknowledge the messiness of my approach by showing the process of producing new knowledge as an iterative act, from which

previously undetected perspectives can emerge. In arts-based research [52] and culturally responsive methodologies [5], transparency builds trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is a criterion for evaluating qualitative and arts-based research methods that can be thought of as similar to reliability in quantitative approaches [60]. Theoretical Framework I draw on two compatible and complimentary theories for my framework. One is Nail’s [61] quantum loop object (QLO) theory. Nail provides an updated Western science-based paradigm for researchers trained in the Western academic tradition that challenges assumptions about objectivity and representation derived from positivist epistemology that ground Western forms of knowledge, particularly in STEM research and pedagogies [10]. The other is Berryman, SooHoo, and Nevin’s [5] framework of culturally responsive methodologies (CRM). I explain them both in detail to show how they work with my arts-based methods to provide a unique way of viewing the continued underrepresentation of Black women in STEM using the cultural artifacts that emerged from the film as a lens of analysis. Quantum loop object theory: Nail’s quantum loop object (QLO) theory [61] is a kinetic new materialist process philosophy. New materialisms emerged from critical theories of the late twentieth century like feminist, critical race, decolonial, and queer theories [62]. In simple terms, new materialist theories focus on the materiality, relationality, and emergent qualities of what we experience and know [63]. Nail’s QLO [61] theory is part of his larger kinetic framework of the philosophy of movement. Nail argues that we exist in an age of unprecedented movement in the twenty-first century [64]. Additionally, he argues that there are more images [65] and objects [61] than ever before in human history, which also are in constant motion. The purpose of his philosophy of movement (POM) is to create new ontological (being) and epistemological (knowing) frameworks in Western philosophy that are a better fitting lens through which to re-view historical events through their materiality, motions, and processes. The historical re-viewing is crucial to Nail’s contribution and purpose to uncover hidden, misunderstood, and ignored elements that are entangled with our conceptions and perceptions of ourselves and how we come to know and experience the world today. QLO theory [61] is therefore a good fit for examining not only the material history of exclusivity and inequities in STEM education and professions, but also for giving voice to those whose contributions to the nation have been invisible and silenced. There are three concepts Nail [61] uses that describe the relational motion of matter in knowledge production: emergence, feedback, and hybridity. Interpreting quantum field theory, mathematical category theory, and chaos theory, Nail provides an emergent process of producing knowledge, which he terms pedesis, that occurs through contingent iterative feedback loops that produces hybrid meta-knowledge, or fields of knowledge like engineering education. Nail argues that experiments are only one part of the labor of science. It is the repeated measuring, objectification, and ordering of these material experiences into fields of knowledge that produces objects of knowledge, including the motions of inscribing of descriptions in conference papers and presenting them. Because quantum field theory hypothesizes all matter as in motion, emergent, and contingent, there is no objectivity, statis, or determinant matter or knowledge [61]. Nail’s theory challenges the hegemony of modern western scientific assumptions about knowledge production that are, at least in part, a source of conflict within EHED research to increase and improve diversity, inclusivity, and equity [10]. The result of his interpretation is a formalization of the process of knowing that does not obscure the process itself. Culturally responsive methods: Nail’s [61] quantum loop object theory resonates with Berryman, SooHoo, and Nevin’s [5] culturally responsive methodologies (CRM) framework. Their framework combines critical theory and an Indigenous New Zealand Māori framework called Kaupapa Māori to challenge the historical dynamics of outside researchers devaluing the contributions of the communities and individuals that are the focus of the inquiry. Critical theory acknowledges the hegemony of Western ways of knowing in modern Western education and is informed by Indigenous, Latinx, LGBQ, disability, and other scholarship from communities that are underrepresented in academia. Critical theory is an offshoot of critical pedagogy that is influenced by Freire. Both critical theory and pedagogy share the intent to include the research participants’ cultural lives in the processes of knowledge production. To this end, because I am researching with cultural artifacts and not people, I center the critical literature by Black women to elevate their voices. Additionally, critical ethnography is incorporated into CRM [5] with a requirement for self-reflexivity by the researcher of my own power, biases, assumptions, and academic agendas. In critical theory and pedagogy, everyone must transparently share their various identities and political ideologies in the research process. This sharing has the effect of creating an alternative learning and research space in which there are no outside experts whose role is objective observers, only participants as learners.

To this end, I include examples of my own self-interrogation as a White woman in the analysis section below, including how my racial and gender identities affect my analysis and interpretation of the findings. The other part of the CRM [5] framework is from the Māori of New Zealand and is called Kaupapa Māori. This unique cultural framework identifies the effects of colonization and the differentials in power, control, and participation in Western conceptions about knowledge formation. To shift the political consciousness of the Māori people, Kaupapa Māori emerged in New Zealand after WWII to reject the colonizing stories told by outside experts about the Māori. The movement prioritized the Māori culture in the knowledge production process to counter centuries of experts degrading Māori ways of knowing in education and research. Today, it is has come to generally mean reconnection with a community’s own historical culture and political power that treats their cultural practices as different but equivalent frameworks with different purposes. Culturally responsive methodologies [5] draw on the overlapping values of critical theory and Kaupapa Māori. These values include prioritizing relationships and dialogue, giving voice through narratives, valuing human dignity, accessing cultural political consciousness, and resisting power structures that are hierarchal. Both QLO [61] and CRM [5] embrace multi-logicality and epistemological pluralism and situate the research details in holistic contexts. The goal of research in CRM [5] is the generation of transformative and organic content and, related to ABR methods [60], the use of aesthetic and dialogical spaces for inquiry. The purpose of CRM [5] is to benefit both the community of participants and the researcher’s academic agendas. In summary, not only do QLO theory [61] and CRM [5] rest on different epistemological approaches traditionally used in engineering education research, they both also challenge Western academic assumptions about knowledge creation as apolitical and ahistorical, making them a good fit for my study on the material history of STEM diversity. Research Design and Methods As an arts-based researcher, I adapt the creative arts for social research, using the unique capacities of the arts to evoke and provoke different ways of knowing in the researcher but also in the audience as they reflect on their own experiences in relationship to the research interpretations [60]. Arts-based research methods emerged as a branch of Western qualitative research theories and practices [66] that occur along a continuum of art-science, which provides flexibility for using creative practices in the research design, content generation, analysis, and/or interpretation. I chose these inductive and generative creative practices to produce knowledge that mirrors the processes that Nail [61] and CRM [5] describe. Arts-based methods can be used in tandem with traditional qualitative and quantitative practices or alone [60], which in my work-in-progress study is a hybrid [61] of both qualitative and arts-based methods. Arts-based methods are diverse and include all creative genres and media: visual art, video, performance including theater and dance, poetry, and literature [60]. I describe my own unique hybrid [61] use of media and methods across my research design below. In arts-based methods, creative practices provide a variety of ways of knowing that are imaginative, non-verbal, sensory, and kinesthetic [53]. Arts-based methods are a good fit to examine the hidden elements of Black women’s experiences in STEM as these methods can generate empathy, disrupt dominant discourses, and transform viewers through an affective, emotional, and embodied experiences of the creative output [52]. I conducted previous visual arts-based historical research that examined early modern images of women with technology in the U.S. from between 1880-1930 that functioned as a pilot study for this current research project [67]. Content generation: Instead of the term “data collection”, arts-based methods utilize “content generation” to better reflect and show the creative process of knowledge production [52]. In this section, I transparently describe my ongoing, relational feedback loops to [61] show how new knowledge is generated in my study. I include my own self-reflections, following CRM principles [5], to show how my new understandings of Black women’s experiences in STEM emerged from looping with the film, the research literature, and the generated content that continues to emerge during this work-in-progress study. By doing so, my aim is to show the reader how my unique methodology is different as well as increase the trustworthiness of my findings through transparency [5], [52]. I began this study by re-watching the film at home for the first time since I watched in when it was released in 2016 but after beginning my literature review for context. I took handwritten notes on the images, scenes, and events in the movie that resonated with the critical literature on diversity in STEM, and specifically the literature on Black women’s experiences in STEM. After watching the film again, I wrote memos, poetry, and reflective analysis of my own perceptions based on my intersecting identities [23]: a White female artist who is currently a doctoral candidate in higher education researching diversity in engineering education using arts-based methods, but who also earned a master’s degree and was an adjunct professor in an engineering school’s liberal arts program. My process of writing

reflections, poetry, and analysis memos is continuous and iterative throughout the research project as content generation, analysis, and interpretation. Through each new round or loop [61] of interaction with the literature and images, I generate new understandings from which this paper and my presentation at the conference emerge as new fields of knowledge to share. I intend to fold in new feedback from readers and my audience of engineering educators at the conference. I generated content through searching university library databases, Google Scholar, Google, and Google Images. I started by searching both for literature and images using the film title as my search term. This inquiry mostly produced film and book reviews. Until this project, I was unaware that the film was based on a book, which I have not read. The movie reviews interestingly reached across disciplines and journals. In searching the peer reviewed literature, I found the film title Hidden Figures used metaphorically in a few titles related to diversity in STEM education and professions, like Bookers’ [68] 2018 dissertation title “Hidden no more: factors that contribute to STEM graduate degree attainment in African American women”, an education psychology article “(Un)hidden figures: a synthesis of research examining the intersectional experiences of Black women and girls in STEM education” [69], and Guzman’s [24] 2019 “Beyond Hidden Figures: shining a spotlight on constructed hierarchies of gender, age, and elementary mathematics”. Often my search for literature produced images and links to websites that were related to STEM education and diversity. These include NASA, a Wikipedia page, the Hidden Figures Twitter account (inactive since 2017), and the online encyclopedia site “Alternatives to slavery”. Katherine Johnson, one of the main characters in the film, died in 2020, so I found many obituary tributes that included images of her being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the nation’s first African American president, Barack Obama in 2015. Images as content for analysis: As a visual artist my epistemology, or way of knowing, involves thinking with images. This method includes performing visual analysis of the images I generated that I iteratively looped in [61] with the peer reviewed literature to uncover hidden relationships. In this section, I describe examples of my ongoing iterative image generation. My Google image search using the search term hidden figures generated a long series of links at the top of the webpage, which I found interesting in relationship to the critical literature I reviewed. These links include the individual character’s names like Katherine Johnson as well as the actors who played them in the film. Other link terms included: NASA, mathematics, human computers, John Glenn, Langley, engineer, and Oscars, to name a few. What caught my eye were the three links related to clothing labeled as fashion, outfit, and dress. I explored all three links and the images and patterns related to the Google algorithms that produced these search terms. I found these links were related to the historical women’s clothing and fashion in the film. but also, clothing worn by the actresses at the Oscar awards. I discovered that in all three of the links there were multiple images of young Black girls wearing a Hidden Figures costumes of each character as shown in Fig. 1 [70]. For context, I followed each of the search engine’s images to the websites from which the images came. Methods wise, I oscillated back and forth [61] between the literature, news and popular websites related to the film, and the specific images/content related to the movie and characters that emerged through my searches.

Fig. 1. Girls dressed as Hidden Figures film characters from online source.

The social media image collection site Pinterest provided an enormous quantity of film related images and additional related search terms. I followed an algorithm generated search prompt of “Hidden Figures aesthetic” because of my use of aesthetic arts-based methods to uncover hidden relationships. I sensed these images were centered on the historical era in the film, again mostly focused on the clothing and fashion in the film. Other online images that were plentiful were Hidden Figures themed coloring pages for children and multiple lesson plans for teachers including a NASA Hidden Figures Toolkit with resources for K-12 teachers to teach a variety of mathematics and science lessons. I also came across a Katherine Johnson Barbie doll Mattel created as first in a line of dolls celebrating inspiring women as historical pioneers. I found artistic interpretations [71], [72] of the three main characters in posters and artworks that similarly showed the figures wearing the clothes from the film and each character’s body type, hair style, and posture evident. However, I noticed that often the facial features were abstracted and sometimes the faces were blank and devoid of features in these interpretive artworks (Fig. 2) [73].

Fig. 2. Interpretive drawing of film characters from Guisil's Doodles. Generating my own content as feedback loops of analysis: CRM [5] requires that I constantly self-reflect about how my own various social identities intersect with the entire research process, which I equate with Nail’s [61] concept of feedback loops. Transparently, I must disclose that this project coincides with the development of my doctoral dissertation research proposal that uses the same methodological framework and requires ongoing self- reflection throughout the entire process [5], creating a hybridity of knowledge [61] across both my dissertation proposal as well as this study. In my proposed dissertation research, I collaborate with underrepresented engineering students to learn about their experiences of professional socialization into the culture of engineering. As I have looped through and around both projects using my arts-based methods of concept mapping in a paper journal, poetic writing, drawing, and oil painting as well as qualitative analysis memos, I have come to better understand my positionality as a White [42] female doctoral candidate working on diversity in engineering education and how it affects my process of analysis and interpretation. My process is different than in positivist methods where isolation, control, and replicability are valued [60]. In my framework, there are no borders or separations other than the ones I create as I order, re-view, and re-order this emerging new knowledge into a meta-stable pattern or field, [61]. Reduction to one answer is not my goal; rather, it is my process that uncovers what was previously hidden in subjective ways that are unique to me as the researcher, but also to you as the reader. This uncovering process shifts how we perceived the relationships between our own experiences of the film, the content I share here, and our own local individual experiences related to our own intersecting social identities. Discussion of My Analysis Process and Early Findings As this is a work-in-progress, I am still looping through content generation and literature related to my study. Indeed, in QLO theory [61] and CRM [4], theoretically I am perpetually entangled with the film as I move into the future; each additional future viewing of the film or additional content I encounter will continue to be folded into my understanding of the film and Black women and girl’s experiences in STEM that this study began. However, there are a few patterns that emerged from my process that I share here. In my analysis process I repeatedly re-viewed the draft paper I submitted, including the reviewer comments and suggestions, along with my guiding research questions, my handwritten notes from watching the film, notes from my image and research literature searches,

concepts from my theoretical framework of QLO theory [61] and CRM [4], and my self-reflective drawing and mapping in my paper journal, which looped in all these entangled threads. I identified emerging patterns related to race, gender, visibility, and power [42] and who is included in STEM history. Using QLO theory [65], I also analyzed how these patterns move in the film but also in U.S. society’s and engineering educators’ understanding of race and gender in STEM. For example, the scene where astronaut John Glenn greets the NASA staff and the women of color are segregated and ignored until Glenn, who has unrestricted mobility in the space, moves toward them to show appreciation. White men in the film hold power over movement in spaces like the police officer at the beginning of the film, the leaders at NASA who recruit bodies into prestigious roles and control access to information in closed door meetings, and the judge empowered to control the character Mary’s entry into engineering classes. Towards the end of the film, Glenn requests that Katherine Johnson calculate his Friendship 7 orbit trajectory; as she rushes her calculations to the command center and hands them over, the door to the room is shut in her face, blocking her entry. It is another empowered White male body, played by Kevin Costner, that opens the door and provides her access. There is a revealing difference between the film’s adaptation and the book’s account about the movements of the women’s bodies on the NASA campus [7]. The film version, written by a White man and a White woman, removes Katherine Johnson’s agency and resiliency and instead gives these motions to Costner’s character as he dramatically removes the “colored” sign from the women’s bathrooms, providing the Black women entry. In fact, Johnson used the bathroom designated for White women in the building without ever asking for permission. Other repeated themes of visibility in the film include the Cold War threat of the Soviets watching from their Sputnik satellite, Katherine’s eye glasses as a code for her intelligence, her hyper-visibility on the ladder working calculations on the enormous chalkboard, and when she pours herself a cup of coffee from the shared pot in the Space Task Force room, resulting in her access to coffee being restricted to a designated coffee pot labeled “colored”. In fact, her visibility as a brilliant mathematician is negated when she first enters the Space Task Force room and is handed a full garbage can based on assumptions of how Black women entering this space are identified as custodians. The character Dorothy’s leadership and managerial abilities and work are invisible in the organization as she is repeatedly denied a formal management title. Dorothy experiences hyper-visibility in the public library while searching for knowledge that strengthens her contribution to NASA and the nation, and she is removed from the space. To summarize, the film demonstrates how the women’s visibility and hyper-visibility affect their movements, while the film also takes liberty with the book’s account to elevate the White male characters’ motions in relationship to these women’s experiences. The film does however make visible the invaluable work of patriotic women like Johnson, Vaughn, and Jackson in relationship to the historic images and heroic stories of White male astronauts like Glenn. My guiding research questions for this project, however, are focused on the movement of the film with Black women and girls’ interest and participation in STEM and the film’s effect on the larger public and STEM educators. I found through my study that the arts can influence participation in STEM higher education through films like Hidden Figures by visibly showing role models to girls and students from racially underrepresented communities in engineering, which the literature shows are crucial [38], [39]. The content that I generated showed these motions toward visibility like the activity of the Black girls dressing up as the characters in the film. Their dressing up presented opportunities for the girls to ontological and epistemologically know their own STEM capabilities beyond what they see in the media, that is, the dearth of Black female characters in STEM media [7]. In one instance, it was a Milwaukee schoolteacher [70] who had all the children in his class dress as inspirational characters for Black History Month, including the role models in Hidden Figures (Fig. 1). The other was a project through the Girl Scouts with a similar intention to celebrate Women’s History Month in 2017 [74]. Another example of a pattern I sense is in the myriad of creative visual interpretations of the three characters without distinct facial features. The interpretive artwork in which the three women characters are shown in their identifiable dresses (Fig. 2) from the movie appear in a variety of backgrounds and were produced for a variety of reasons [63]- [66], some of which are difficult to discern through social media like Pinterest. Drawing on the literature that shows the need for Black women role models [33], [38], I contemplate that by leaving the faces somewhat ambiguous, young Black girls and Black women STEM students and professionals can imaginatively insert themselves into the image as a way of finding connection to a type of mentor. In some ways the blank or nondescriptive features could be interpreted as making the historical women featured in the film invisible. However, I do not think this is the case. Rather, I hypothesize that it provides a type of visibility that is accessible in which to see oneself. Additionally,

and/or alternatively, many of the interpretive images are celebratory of the women and the film, perhaps reflecting the enthusiasm in which the movie was received. Answers to my research question about how engineering educators and the U.S public perceive and interpret new information about the history of discrimination in STEM fields, however, are more complicated in terms of visibility. As I showed, the political settings and agency given to characters in the film differs from the book [7]. While the film is celebrated for providing a much-needed set of role models for Black female STEM students, I did not find extensive public content that indicated that the film substantially affected how the public perceives and knows who is historically included as patriots and heroes of the Cold War space race. NASA embraced the women in the film to promote diversity in STEM, even naming their headquarter building after Dorothy Vaughn [75]. According to their 2020 data, NASA also employs Black or African Americans at a rate of 12% [76], which is close to the overall portion of Black and African Americans the U.S. population of 13.4% [77]. However, as recently as 2020, NASA declared an initiative to remove racist derogatory nicknames given to cosmic objects from use at the agency [78], indicating that making the organization inclusive and equitable is an ongoing mission. The whiteness [42], and maleness [11], of STEM remains in place as current diversity research demonstrates [17]-[26]. While I found that a film can disrupt aspects of our Cold War historical narrative, a long legacy of women being purposefully excluded and made invisible in engineering education spaces remains. I recall a story from Oldenziel’s historical research [13] about Nora Blatch whose male classmates at Cornell in 1904 arranged a date for her with a friend outside their department, during which time the picture of the male students doing field work was taken. And given the invisibility of Black women scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in U.S. media [7], [47], one film does not substantially alter public perceptions of American history. However, the film and book reviews do show making these women’s stories visible is a step in the right direction [6], [16]. Lastly, as a White woman, I must reflect on how my own perspectives moved during this research process. Admittedly, in my first viewing of the film back in 2016, I strongly identified with the sexism described in the film. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, many of the same gender tropes in the film are familiar to me. However, I relegated the depictions of racism in the film to the historical past because I did not experience this form of oppression personally; it was not real to me and I gravitated towards what Ahmed [42] calls happy diversity stories, which focus on the progress made in diversity efforts. It has only been through my doctoral research and intentionally choosing coursework that required self-reflection on my various social identities that I have come to understand that I do not understand Black women’s experiences but can learn about them through my own research with projects like this one. Limitations and Future Work My use of a unique arts-based research method [52] guided by culturally responsive methodologies [5] uses my own individual subjective experiences during the research process; there are not universal replicable findings [60]. In this way, my project has many limitations, but also many potential future iterations by other researchers besides myself. Indeed, QLO theory [61] interprets the process of creating knowledge as iterative and relational to the past and the future. I found much more visual material related to the film than I had originally anticipated and there are countless possibilities for future work by others using my methodology or with quantitative and/or qualitative methods and theories of their own choosing. I look forward to looping in the feedback that emerges from engineering educators when I present my study at the conference. As this is a work-in-progress, I have not yet completed my analysis using my visual arts-based methods with the Adobe software program Photoshop. I use photographic collage [79] [80] as a method to aesthetically loop with the visual and textual content I generated. Through this practice, I create hybrid [61] collaged images that furthers the analysis I described above about the motions related to visibility and power. Examples of what I may include in these hybrid images are juxtapositions [81] of my images/content with other elements related to STEM such as popular magazines and professional journals, diversity research, and media about Black women and girls’ experiences in STEM. Another juxtaposition that I sense may create potent new understandings about the history of racism and sexism in STEM are images of the political and social conflict from the timeframe that Thompson [7] argues was downplayed in the film in contrast to the book, with the media content related to the current iterations of Black Lives Matter movement and racial political strife that emerged since killing of George Floyd by police in 2020 [36]. Other content I am interested in exploring is the impact Katherine Johnson had as a living public figure for several years after the release of the film in 2016. I want to better understand her influence in the African

American community, but also any reactions from and impacts on the White public’s understanding of the contributions of Black women in STEM through examining media images and stories. In conclusion, I believe my study makes significant contributions in two ways. One contribution is my use of a methodology that is radically different from the positivism that dominates engineering education [4]. My goal was to uncover new hidden stories that may help increase diversity [61] in STEM by using the film Hidden Figures and content related to the film. My use of QLO theory [61] and my own arts-based methods [52] shifted how I approached my research questions, generated content, and analyzed and interpreted the findings; I focused on the iterative relational feedback loops and the hybrid knowledge that emerged from this process to show the relationships and motions between the arts and STEM diversity. My second related contribution is the findings themselves that show the myriad ways that the motions of Black women in STEM are affected by their visibility but also how visible Black women STEM role models can change the trajectory of young Black girls. And lastly, by folding in Ahmed’s [42] phenomenology of whiteness as a lens for my own self-reflection [5] and to analyze the content, I added another dimension from which I can better understand the visibility issues that women of color face in STEM and how their movements may be arrested and restricted.

References

[1] B. L. Yoder, "Engineering by the numbers 2017," 15 January 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.asee.org/documents/papers-and-publications/publications/college-profiles/2017-Engineering-by- Numbers-Engineering-Statistics.pdf.

[2] M. Boon and S. Van Baalen, "Epistemology for interdisciplinary research – shifting philosophical paradigms of science," European Journal of Philosophy of Science, vol. 9, no. 16, pp. 1-28, 2018.

[3] C. Baille and R. Armstrong, "Crossing knowledge boundaries and thresholds: Challenging the dominant discourse within engineering education," in Engineering education for social justice: Critical explorations and opportunties, vol. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology 10, J. Lucena, Ed., Dordrecht, Springer Science+Business Media, 2013, pp. 135-152.

[4] L. L. Bucciarelli, "The epistemic implicatioins of engineering rhetoric," Synthese, vol. 168, pp. 333-356, 2009.

[5] M. Berryman, S. SooHoo and A. Nevin, Eds., Culturally responsive methodologies, Bingley, West Yorkshire: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2013.

[6] "Hidden Figures," [Online]. Available: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340/.

[7] C. L. Thompson, ""See what she becomes": Black women's resistance in "Hidden Figures"," Feminist Media Studies, pp. 1-17, 2020.

[8] M. L. Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, William & Morrow Company, 2016.

[9] National Science Foundation, "Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering," NSF, Arlington, VA, 2019.

[10] D. Riley, Engineering and social justice: Synthesis lectures on engineers, technology, and society, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2008.

[11] J. Heybach and A. Pickup, "Whose STEM? Disrupting the gender crisis within STEM," Educational Studies, vol. 53, no. 6, pp. 614-627, 2017.

[12] A. Bix, Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women, Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2013.

[13] R. Oldenziel, Making Technology Maculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America 1870-1945, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999.

[14] T. Boisseau and A. M. Markwyn, Eds., Gendering the fair: Histories of women and gender at the World's Fairs, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

[15] L. M. Frehill, "The gendered construction of the engineering profession in the United States, 1893-1920," Men and Masculinities, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 383-403, April 2004.

[16] M. Kang, "The question of the woman-machine: Gender, thermodynamics, and hysteria in the nineteenth century," SubStance, vol. 47, no. 147, pp. 27-43, 2018.

[17] J. P. Carpenter, "Hidden figures light up the screen: Black women who helped America win the space race," Math Horizons, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 18-21, 2017.

[18] W. Faulkner, "'Nuts and bolts people': Gender-troubled engineering identities," Social Studies of Science, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 331-356, 2007.

[19] E. Godfrey, "Cultures within Cultures: Welcoming or unwelcoming for women?," in Proceedings of 2007 Annual Conference and Exposition of American Society of Engineering Education, Honolulu, 2007.

[20] C. E. Foor and S. E. Walden, ""Imaginary Engineering" or "Re-imagined Engineering": Negotiating Gendered Identities in the Borderland of a College of Engineering," The National Women’s Studies Association Journal, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 41-64, Summer 2009.

[21] S. R. Harper, "An anti-deficit achievement framework for research on students of color in STEM," New Directions For Institutional Research, vol. 148, pp. 63-74, 2010.

[22] D. Rice and M. Alfred, "Personal and structural elements of support for African American female engineers," Journal of STEM education, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 40-49, July-September 2014.

[23] K. Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1, 1989.

[24] L. D. Guzman, "Beyond hidden figures: Shining a spotlight on constructed hierarchies of gender, age, and elementary mathematics," Gendered Issues, vol. 36, pp. 392-414, 2019.

[25] E. A. Cech, "The (mis)framing of social justice: Why ideologies of depoliticizaiton and meritocracy hinder engineers' ability to think about social justices," in Engineering education for social justice, L. Lucena, Ed., Dordrecht, Springer, 2013, pp. 67-84.

[26] Z. Leonardo and A. A. Broderick, "Smartness as Property: A Critical Exploration of Intersections Between Whiteness and Disability Studies," Teachers College Record, vol. 113, no. 10, pp. 2206-2232, October 2011.

[27] S. M. Lord and M. M. Comacho, "Latinos and Latinas in the Borderlands of Education: Researching minoritiy populations in Engineering," in IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Oklahoma, 2013.

[28] T. R. Morton and E. C. Parsons, "#BlackGirlMagic: The identity conceptualization of Black women in undergraduate STEM education," Science Education, pp. 1363-1393, 2018.

[29] J. D. Anderson, "Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post-World War II Era," History of Education Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 151-, Summer 1993.

[30] A. E. Slaton, Race, rigor, and selectivity in U.S. engineering: The history of an occupational color line, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

[31] I. X. Kendi, Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America, New York: Bold Type Books, 2016.

[32] M. J. Lee, J. D. Collins, S. A. Harwood and R. B. H. Mendenhall, "“If you aren’t White, Asian or Indian, you aren’t an engineer”: racial microaggressions in STEM education," International Journal of STEM Education, pp. 1-16`, 2020.

[33] A. M. Allen, "Do we know who is really doing the planting? A case study of traditionally white institutions identified as top degree producers of black engineering undergraduates (Publication No. 10692481)," Proquest Dissertations, 2017.

[34] A. Danowitz and K. Beddoes, "A snapshot of mental health and wellness of engineering students across the western United States," in IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE), Uppsula, Sweden, 2020.

[35] A. R. Towns, "Black "matter" lives," Women's Studies in Communication, vol. 4, no. 14, pp. 349-358, 2018.

[36] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "Summary of terrorism threat to the U.S. homeland," DHS, Washington, DC, 2021.

[37] E. D. Tate and M. C. Linn, "How does identity shape the experiences of women of color engineering students," Journal of Science Education and Technology, vol. 14, no. 5/6, pp. 483-493, December 2005.

[38] A. M. Nash and A. L. Peters, "For us: Towards an intersectional leadership conceptualization by Black women for Black girls," Journal of Educational Administration and History, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 270-282, 2020.

[39] M. E. Sanchez, L. I. Hypolite, C. B. Newman and D. G. Cole, "Black women in STEM: The need for intersectional supports in professional conference spaces," The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 88, no. 3, pp. 297-310, 2019.

[40] E. S. Pietri, I. R. Johnson and E. Ozgumus, "One size may not fit all: Exploring how the intersection of race and gender and stigma consciousness predict effective identity-safe cues for Black women," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 74, pp. 291-306, 2018.

[41] R. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why its so hard for White people to talk about racism, Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.

[42] S. Ahmed, "A phenomenology of whiteness," Feminist Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 149-168, 2007.

[43] S. V. Iverson, "Camouflaging Power and Privilege: A Critical Race Analysis of University Diversity Policies," Education Administration Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 586-611, December 2007.

[44] S. R. Harper, "Race without Racism: How Higher Education Researchers Minimize Racist Institutional Norms," The Review of Higher Education, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 9-29, Fall 2012.

[45] T. Mayes, "Campus climate and the underrepresented minority engineering student experience: A critical race theory study (UMI No 3639354)," Proquest Dissertation, 2014.

[46] M. Babercheck, "Science, sex, and stereotypical images in scientific advertising," in Women, science, and technology: A reader in feminist science studies, New York, Routledge, 2009, pp. 118-132.

[47] J. Steinke and P. M. P. Tavarez, "Cultural representations of gender and STEM: Portrayals of female STEM characters in popular films 2002-2014," International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 244-277, January 2018.

[48] C. Jaramillo, "How the movie "Hidden Figures" inspired Dallas' engineering community," 12 January 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/2017/01/12/how-the-movie-hidden- figures-inspired-dallas-black-engineering-community/.

[49] K. W. Guyotte, N. W. Sochacka, T. E. Castantino, J. Walther and N. N. Kellam, "STEAM as social practice: Cultivating creativity in transdisciplinary spaces," Art Education, vol. 67, no. 6, pp. 12-19, 2014.

[50] M. Bang and D. Medin, "Cultural Processes in Science Education: Supporting the Navigation of Multiple Epistemologies," Science Education, vol. 94, pp. 1008-1026, 2010.

[51] E. P. Douglas, M. Koro-Ljungberg and M. Borrego, "Challenges and promises of overcoming epistemological and methodological partiality: Advancing engineering education through acceptance of diverse ways of knowing," European Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 247-257, June 2010.

[52] P. Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice, 2nd ed., New York: Guiford Press, 2015.

[53] D. S. Ozkan, C. D. Edwards, D. Bhaduri and D. Bairaktarova, "Sketching with students: An arts-informed qualitative analysis of first-year engineering students," in ASEE, Salt Lake City, 2018.

[54] N. N. Kellam, K. S. Gerow and J. Walther, "Narrative analysis in engineering education research: Exploring ways of constructing narratives to have resonance with the reader and critical research implications," in ASEE, Seattle, 2015.

[55] N. Kellam, A. Cirell, A. Boklage and B. Coley, "Using I-poems to explore the identity of underrepresented engineering student makers," IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, 2018.

[56] b. hooks, Art on my mind: Visual politics, New York: The New Press, 1995.

[57] A. D. Oliver, ""Tell me a story": A critical hip-hop framework for storytelling higher education," Storytelling, Self, Society, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 210-222, Fall 2017.

[58] C. Davis, "Sampling poetry, pedagogy, and protest to build methodology: Critical poetic inquiry as culturally relevant method," Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 114-124, 2021.

[59] S. Lawrence-Lightfoot and J. H. Davis, The art and science of portraiture, San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997.

[60] P. Leavy, Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and community based participatory research approaches, New York: The Guilford Press, 2017.

[61] T. Nail, Theory of the object, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.

[62] R. Dolphijn and I. van der Tuin, Eds., New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, 2012.

[63] K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

[64] T. Nail, Being and Motion, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

[65] T. Nail, Theory of the Image, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

[66] T. Barone and E. W. Eisner, Arts based research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2012.

[67] K. Robert, Historical images of modern technology: A new materialist arts-based approach to engineering diversity, San Francisco, CA, 2020.

[68] A. A. Booker, Hidden no more: Factors that contribute to STEM graduate degree attainment in African American women, Atlanta, GA: Proquest LLLC 13807059, 2018.

[69] D. T. Ireland, K. E. Freeman, C. E. Winston-Proctor, K. D. DeLaine, S. M. Lowe and K. M. Woodson, "(Un)Hidden Figures: A Synthesis of Research Examining the Intersectional Experiences of Black Women and Girls in STEM Education," Review of Research in Education, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 226-254, 2018.

[70] T. Pous, "These three girls dressed up as "Hidden Figures" characters will give you life," 31 January 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.buzzfeed.com/terripous/these-little-girls-rocked-hidden-figures-costumes- and-it-wil.

[71] "Artstation," [Online]. Available: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/PBaLr.

[72] A. S. Mostov, "Hidden Figures for DigitalOceans," [Online]. Available: https://dribbble.com/shots/3315554- Hidden-Figures.

[73] "Guisil's Doodles," [Online]. Available: https://giusilvincenzi.co.uk/post/156932287309/compelling-em-to- include-women-in-the-sequel.

[74] S. Hirsh, "Girls Scouts dress as iconic women in honor of Women's History Month," 15 March 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.self.com/story/girl-scouts-dress-as-iconic-women-womens-history-month.

[75] NASA, "NASA names headquarters after 'Hidden Figure' Mary W. Jackson," 24 June 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-names-headquarters-after-hidden-figure-mary-w-jackson.

[76] NASA, "Workforce Data," 3 June 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.nasa.gov/offices/odeo/workforce- data. [Accessed 2021].

[77] "Quick Facts United States," U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC, 2019.

[78] NASA, "NASA to reexamine nicknames for cosmic objects," 5 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-to-reexamine-nicknames-for-cosmic-objects. [Accessed May 2021].

[79] D. Davis, "Collage inquiry: Creative and particular applications," Learning Landscapes, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 245- 265, Autumn 2008.

[80] K. Vaughn, "Pieced together: Collage as an artist's method for interdisciplinary research," International Journal of Qualitative Methods, pp. 27-52, 2005.

[81] L. Butler-Kisber and T. Poldma, "The power of visual approaches in qualitative inquiry: The use of collage making and concept mapping in experimental research," Journal of Research Practice, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 1-16, 2010.