JOINT PROJECT

The joint project "Re-Imagining GenderFuture in STEM – The Potential of attracting and retaining female non-traditional university students by integrating sustainability and gender equity in engineering sciences" researches the potential of GreenTEC influences in technical courses to attract new student groups.

RE-IMAGINING genderFUTURE in STEM

The project "Re-Imagining GenderFuture in STEM" investigates the extent to which the integration of sustainable aspects into the curricula of technical courses of study can be a 'door opener' into the technical sciences for female talent. The focus here is on "non-traditional students" (NTS), i.e. young women from non-technical and/or non-academic parental homes, often with a migrant background. At the intersection of gender-specific structures of meaning, subject-cultural patterns of orientation and university-cultural symbolic orders, the imagination and practical production of the 'normal' - or deviant - student is empirically analyzed.

"Think Tech- Think Green- Think Nontraditional!" –

Against that background, the goal of the project is to reimagine young female talent and the development potential of higher education in terms of 'Greening MINT'. How do young female GreenTEC students imagine sustainability-related organizational change? To what extent do university GreenTEC strategies contribute to transforming traditional and classically exclusionary 'view orders' in a gender-appropriate way? How can the implicitly patriarchal and technocratic models that have been embedded in TEC be overturned? These questions, among others, will be analyzed from a discourse-analytical perspective and by means of image-based research methodologies. The answers will be worked on in two subprojects.

Subproject “Non-traditional students in GreenTEC” examines the interplay of imaginations, orientation patterns and design strategies of young women in GreenTEc. Subproject „In organisationale Blickordnungen intervenieren“ is dedicated to the traditionally exclusionary view orders in higher education and explores innovation dynamics through GreenTec.

In addition, innovation labs will be used to explore the ways in which GreenTec students can contribute to the development of higher education potential in the context of the engineering sciences.

The project cooperates with one university and one university of applied sciences which offer engineering bachelor's degree programs that are fundamentally designed for sustainability.