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Quantitative researchers have noted the impact of mentoring and support programming for students from underrepresented groups in engineering. Qualitative researchers have also noted the importance of student agency in persistence through marginalization. Nevertheless, challenges and questions remain in identifying practices which are effective in supporting underrepresented students. The study applies scholarship from critical theory and narrative as a new resource for approaching and understanding the process of supporting marginalized student agency. A longitudinal interview study with a female undergraduate engineering student, Emilia, developed into a way for her to process marginalizing educational experiences and to develop new narratives that expanded her agency. After an in‐depth member check, Emilia became a co‐author contributing a post hoc account of the impact of these discussions. Our analysis indicates that naming one's own oppression and creating narratives that repurpose and resituate stereotypical stories of oppression was a liberatory act for Emilia. We trace three marginalizing themes of the participant's experience that are subverted and resisted through the student co‐constructed narrative. The paper builds theory for diversity support, suggesting critical theorizing may present a new form of agency not yet represented in the literature. It also points to possible value for student participants from qualitative methodologies exploring student experiences. Finally, it suggests supporting critical theorizing as a potential new orientation for diversity practitioners.

To explain educational problems such as student attrition, engineering education literature often focuses on the characteristics of individuals. In 2006, Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne called for examining the “cultural construction” of educational problems, uncovering how multiple actors create and inscribe meaning to the educational problem. We apply the cultural construction framework to examine how the educational problem of a student being “not cut out for engineering” is constructed within the context of a specific electrical engineering course. We focus on culturally taken-for-granted course structures, practices, and interactions, all of which produce the local enactment of this common educational problem. We used ethnographic methods, including field-noted participant observations, one-on-one participant interviews, and video-recorded student work on lab assignments. Coordinating multiple data streams enabled us to question explanations couched in terms of individual ability and background, and to illustrate how ability hierarchies were constructed in the educational context. Our findings illustrate how several mundane and seemingly innocuous aspects of engineering classrooms add up to construct the educational problem of our focal student as “not cut out” for engineering. Contributions to this construction included lecture seating positions, interactional norms in lecture and lab, and labels made meaningful through institutional and interactional processes. The forces at play in constructing educational problems for students are deeply embedded in institutions, disciplines, and society, making it difficult to generate a simple list of instructional interventions. We highlight cultural construction analysis as a potentially fruitful orientation for researchers and practitioners to find the particular sites and tools for local intervention.

This article pulls into the empirical realm a longstanding theoretical debate about the prior knowledge students bring to bear when learning scientific concepts and representations. Misconceptions constructivists view the prior knowledge as stable alternate conceptions that apply robustly across multiple contexts. By contrast, fine-grained constructivists believe that much of students' intuitive knowledge consists of unarticulated, loosely connected knowledge elements, the activation of which depends sensitively on context. By focusing on students' intuitive knowledge about representations, and by fleshing out the two constructivist frameworks, I show that they lead to empirically different sets of predictions. Pilot studies demonstrate the feasibility of a full-fledged experimental program to decide which flavor of constructivism describes students more adequately.

Heywood and Redhead's 1983 algebraic (Kochen-Specker type) impossibility proof, which establishes the inconsistency of a broad class of contextualized local realistic theories, assumes two locality conditions and two auxiliary assumptions. One of those auxiliary conditions, FUNC*, has been called a physically unmotivated,ad hoc formal constraint.

Using the Kochen–Specker contradiction, I prove that ‘local realistic’ theories predict nontrivial violations of the quantum mechanical EPR-type perfect anticorrelations. The proof invokes the same stochastic local realism conditions used in Bell arguments. For a class of theories called ‘orthodox spin theories’, the perfect anticorrelations used in the proof emerge from rotational symmetry. Therefore, an orthodox spin theorist must abandon either the spirit of relativity, as encoded by local realism, or the letter of relativity, which demands rotational invariance.

Abstract: Three claims about what makes a theory ldquophysically completerdquo are (1) Shimony's assertion that a complete theory says ldquoall there is to sayrdquo about nature; (2) EPR's requirement that a complete theory describe all ldquoelements of realityrdquo; and (3) Ballentine and Jarrett's claim that a ldquopredictively completerdquo theory must obey a condition used in Bell deviations. After introducing ldquostatistical completenessrdquo as a partial formalization of (1), we explore the logical and motivational relationships connecting these completeness conditions. We find that statistical completeness motivates but does not imply Jarrett's completeness condition, because Jarrett's condition encodes further intuitions about locality and causality. We also dispute Ballentine and Jarrett's claim that EPR-completeness implies Jarrett's completeness condition.

Abstract: Without invoking macrorealism, we derive a contradiction between the quantum mechanical predictions forsquid's and two intuitive conditions. First, we assume that asquid can be measured without significantly disturbing its subsequent macroscopic behavior. Second, we assume a trivial realism condition much weaker than Leggett's macrorealism. Quantum mechanics itself obeys our realism assumption. This proof suggests that althoughsquid experiments cannot rule out macrorealism, they can rule out most theories that allow noninvasive measurements.

Abstract: I derive a Gleason-type contradiction from assumptions weaker than those needed to reach a Bell inequality. By establishing the inconsistency between local realism and QM's perfect EPR-type anticorrelations, the proof fills in a gap left open by Bell arguments.

According to “modal” interpretations of quantum mechanics, an observable Q can possess a definite value even when the quantum state is not an eigenstate of Q. In this paper, I discuss some interpretive difficulties faced by modal theorists. First, expanding upon Albert and Loewer, I identify two reasons why real-life measurements are never ideal, and I discuss why these considerations bode ill for modal interpretations. Second, I show that modal interpretations provide a less satisfactory explanation of “interference” effects than is provided by pilot-wave interpretations.

Using three intuitive notions about causes, including Redhead's robustness condition, I formulate necessary conditions on partial causes. I then demonstrate that we cannot explain the EPR correlations in terms of partial causes unless we abandon the quantum mechanical framework and adopt a nonlocal hidden-variable theory. The argument, unlike its predecessors, does not appeal to relativity theory.

Home and Sengupta claim to derive a Bell-type inequality without assuming locality. I show that their derivation implicitly assumes determinism and a weak locality condition. Their derivation also relies upon further, highly implausible conditions that severely limit the physical implications of their argument.

Using the Kochen-Specker theorem, we derive a simple algebraic contradiction between various locality assumptions and the predictions of quantum mechanics. Unlike previous algebraic nonlocality proofs, this proof invokes locality conditions uniformly weaker than those needed to derive Bell's inequality. Consequently, our proof rules out a broader class of hidden variable theories.

In this discussion note, I explore the relationship between locality and Home and Sengupta's noncontextuality assumption, challenging some of the authors' claims.