Reimagining STEM: Queer Navigation, Marginalisation and Resistance in Australian Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Higher Education Spaces

This study queers STEM spaces through collaborative walking interviews, sensory exploration and performative autoethnography to reveal how technoscientific environments regulate embodiment, affect and power. Mobilising queer theory, intersectional feminism and affect theory, it challenges institutions to move beyond symbolic inclusion toward structural and epistemic transformation. The research shows resistance is generative rather than peripheral, creating openings for alternative ways of inhabiting and reshaping STEM. It positions queer ways of knowing, being and doing as vital to reimagining scientific futures and insists that meaningful transformation in STEM requires attending to the embodied, affective and relational dynamics that shape its everyday life.