Disidentifying with Broadening Participation

Broadening participation sends mixed messages to minoritized students. Promises of economic security, democratized technopolitics, and creative expression are interwoven with the discourses of international economic competitiveness, militarism, and cyberlibertarian entrepreneurship. This perspective paper reads the queer of color theory of Jose Esteban Muñoz through the project of broadening participation. Disidentification describes tactical misrecognition by minoritarian subjects, especially by assimilating the dominant cultural images. Instead of arguing for specific kinds of representation, this paper describes paradoxical experiences of minoritization-navigating "who" is a computer scientist-and how they can take us far beyond the expectations of dominant representations.