Feeling STEM: How Affective Infrastructures Shape LGBTQIA+ Participation in Higher Education

Abstract Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) equity research has largely approached inequality through individual and interpersonal lenses, emphasising representation, bias, and local climate while leaving the structural conditions that organise participation under-theorised. This article reframes inequity by analysing affective infrastructures: the emotional norms and ambient pressures embedded in disciplinary cultures, spatial arrangements, and administrative systems that shape participation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual/Aromantic/Agender (LGBTQIA+) people in STEM higher education. Drawing on critical narrative inquiry and in situ walking interviews with twenty-two peer collaborators across five Australian universities, the analysis identifies two interconnected mechanisms through which affective infrastructure operates. Technical affect names the discipline-specific emotional repertoires treated as markers of scientific legitimacy—composure, distance, and confident neutrality—rendering embodied, relational, or reflexive expressions professionally risky. Atmospheric violence describes the low-intensity, cumulative pressures produced through ordinary institutional arrangements, including misrecognising administrative systems, surveillant spatial designs, and structural protection of bigotry. Together, these mechanisms reveal how STEM equity governance produces conditional inclusion: diversity is promoted while emotional conformity is enforced; visibility is encouraged while disclosure remains unsafe; and infrastructural strain is reframed as individual deficiency rather than design failure. The findings show how affective infrastructures redistribute cognitive load and constrain who can appear competent, making scientific participation more energetically costly for LGBTQIA+ people even in the absence of overt discrimination. The article also attends to moments where collaborators resisted, reworked, or interrupted these infrastructures, refusing a deficit-only account of queer and trans participation. By locating exclusion in infrastructural rather than interpersonal conditions, the article contributes a conceptual framework for rethinking STEM equity as a matter of emotional and administrative design, spatial arrangement, rather than individual adaptation.