Amanda J. Brockman
My research focuses on understanding educational problems through a social psychological lens. It is frequently motivated by my prior six-year career as a K-12 public school teacher and generally falls within two areas: 1) K-12 teacher devaluation and activism and 2) marginalization in STEM. As a PhD candidate, my dissertation research falls within the first area and seeks to understand how the interplay of social-psychological factors and multilevel problems faced by educators in their districts led to the current, unprecedented wave of teacher strikes sweeping across the nation. My second line of research centers on using a social-psychological approach to understand the experiences of marginalized groups in STEM. This research arose through my years of work on two research teams on campus, Explorations in Diversifying Engineering Faculty Initiative (EDEFI) within the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College and Beyond the Ph.D. within the Department of Sociology. I also pursue this line of research as an independent scholar. One of my current projects examines how Black doctoral students use social comparison processes to identify a hierarchy of belonging in STEM.
Representative Publications
Brockman, Amanda J. 2021. “‘La Crème de la Crème’: How Racial, Gendered, and Intersectional Social Comparisons Reveal Inequities That Affect Sense of Belonging in STEM.” Sociological Inquiry (Online First). doi: 10.1111/soin.12401
Pitt, Richard, Amanda J. Brockman, and Lin Zhu. 2021. “Parental Pressure and Passion: Competing Motivations for Choosing STEM and Non-STEM Majors Among Women Who Double-Major in Both.” Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 27(1): 1-29. doi: 10.1615/JWomenMinorScienEng.2020026795
McCammon, Holly J., Magdalena Sudibjo, Cathryn Beeson-Lynch, Amanda J. Brockman,* and Minyoung Moon. “Feminist Friends and Foes of the Court: Amicus Curiae in the Supreme Court’s Gender Cases.” Sociological Focus (in press). *final three authors alphabetized—all contributions equal.
Miles, Monica, Amanda J. Brockman, Dara E. Naphan-Kingery. 2020. “Invalidated Identities: The Disconfirming Effects of Racial Microaggressions on Black Doctoral Students in STEM” Journal of Research in Science Teaching. doi: 10.1002/tea.21646
McCammon, Holly J. and Amanda J. Brockman. 2019. “Feminist Institutional Activists: Venue Shifting, Strategic Adaptation, and Winning the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.” Sociological Forum 34(1). doi: 10.1111/socf.12478
Naphan-Kingery, Dara E., Monica L. Miles, Amanda J. Brockman, Rachel G. McKane, Portia K. Botchway, and Ebony O. McGee. 2019. “Investigation of an Equity Ethic in Engineering and Computing Doctoral Students.” Journal of Engineering Education 108(3): 337-354 doi: 10.1002/jee.20284