Not the Only Novice in the Room: Partnerships and Belongingness in a Research Immersion Program

Lack of access to STEMM mentors has been identified as a critical barrier to biomedical research careers, leading to a lack of diversity in this field. To address such a barrier, the National Institutes of Health invested funds to support institutions in developing research immersion programs to provide "underrepresented" students with mentored research experiences. While providing access and opportunity for research experiences is an important equity endeavor, a focus solely on broadening participation neglects the role of institutions in perpetuating hegemonic views of science. Institutions often fail to recognize how entanglements of affect and emotion shape youth experiences in these programs and work to (de)legitimize their sense of belonging in science and perpetuate the notion of science as for an exclusive few. In this paper, we describe findings from a project aimed at understanding the entanglement of emotion and affect in a research immersion program and how these entanglements shaped participants' sense of belongingness in the program and research more broadly. Drawing on a poststructural feminist framework, we come to understand how individual histories and emotional experiences with racial and gender stereotypes work at the meta-affective level to contract feelings of belongingness in science for students.