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On march 2022, #WhyNotMeSTEM Diversity Drivers organized a conference at Lubbock, Texas.

The conference organized by the team engages a variety of multidisciplinary academic and practitioner stakeholders in order to create innovative, actionable research agendas to address the persistent problem of effective involvement of students and researchers from underrepresented minority groups in STEM. The #WhyNotMe: STEM Diversity Drivers framework collects and synthesizes a wide range of narratives to further understanding of both supportive and unsupportive mechanisms that affect the involvement in STEM of individuals from different underrepresented groups. The conference focuses on holistic, developmental, relational, structural, and methodological innovations, with the aims to generate actionable research themes. The conference brings together a multidisciplinary team with a variety of substantive expertise and methodological skillsets. The team will consider the role that factors such as interpersonal relationships, familial support, developmental trajectories, and larger societal messages (e.g., meta-narratives, policies, history) play in supporting and discouraging underrepresented individuals from pursuing STEM. It will also engage with stakeholders to develop innovative methodological approaches to better capture the complex, fluid landscape of diverse representation in STEM. The conference participants will develop specific research themes and facilitate methodological innovations to expand the NSF2026 ideas in #WhyNotMe.

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