STEMpunk Manifesto

PREAMBLE

In the past two weeks I’ve team-taught a polymers unit for Materials Science Engineering, and I’ve presented a cultural analysis for the Modernist Studies Association. Does this odd convergence make me a schizophrenic academic? No. This makes me STEMpunk.

Allow me to open my portmanteau before I take its picture and take it out.

STEM means science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: a current emphasis in restructuring American higher education. At its basic level, punk is resistance through style, as Dick Hebdige put it. In the late 1970s, punk repurposing transformed everyday objects into subculture style in the U.K. and elsewhere. Safety pins migrated from the nursery to the street, bringing edginess to punk fashion. Coined in the late 1980s, steampunk is writer Kevin Jeter’s term for retro-tech speculative fiction that returns to the age of the steam engine.

STEMpunk resists seeing the humanities as being divorced from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. A revolution in curriculum, STEMpunk returns to the humanities to invent future technologies of higher education.

TRIPTYCH

Here is STEMpunk’s current passport photo.

CHANT

• In the periodic table of STEMpunk, H is Humanities.
• STEMpunk is not a calculation; it is a catalyst.
• STEMpunk is not finding X; it is the X-factor.
• STEMpunk does not solve the equation; it poses the problem.
• STEMpunk is a bonding agent for curriculum repair.
• STEMpunk is a DIY poetics of course design.
• STEMpunk cases out the case study.
• STEMpunk historicizes the future.
• STEMpunk sustains sustainability studies.
• STEMpunk is radical repurposing.
• STEMpunk has test tubes and YouTube.
• STEMpunk is PowerPoint and power relations.
• The STEMpunk revolution will be digitized.

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