About ICQCM
ICQCM is a community of practice focused on providing training in critical quantitative methods, particularly to underrepresented groups and minority serving institutions, around equity and STEM education.
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In order to meet the nation’s need for a larger Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) workforce, we seek to broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in data science and other STEM fields.
Bringing the capacities of Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o/x scholars to bear on the production of methodologically rigorous and innovative grant proposals will diversify and strengthen the nation’s scientific research funding apparatus.
Equipping researchers and the broader public with a critical awareness of how methodologies structure inequality and opportunity–and have also advanced processes of racialization, white supremacy, and erasure–is essential in understanding the social implications of data science within an increasingly diverse world.
Demonstrating and developing approaches of how to employ quantitative and computational methods that are situated in context, history, material social relations, and as a product of material and discursive formations. In addition, we seek to demonstrate and develop non-instrumental approaches of quantification that do not essentialize, universalize, or treat data as self-evident, while also placing more of an analytical focus on multiplicity and the marginal subject.
History
ICQCM was co-founded in 2019 by education researchers Dr. Odis Johnson, Jr., Dr. Ebony McGee, and Dr. Ezekiel Dixon-Román as a National Science Foundation data science training institute, with support from the Spencer Foundation and William T. Grant Foundation. Originally housed at Washington University of St. Louis, where Dr. Johnson was based, with programming also through Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania (where Dr. McGee and Dr. Dixon-Román were then respectively based), ICQCM moved to Johns Hopkins University along with Dr. Johnson in 2021.
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The above is adapted from the description found in ”Epistemic Marginalization and Methodology 50 Years after The Death of White Sociology” (Johnson, 2025). Please see this publication for more of the underlying theory and background motivation for the creation and mission of ICQCM.
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Activities
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The primary activity of ICQCM has been in training cohorts of scholars. ICQCM scholar cohorts have been groups of either PhD students, or of junior faculty and/or industry researchers, who receive access to training, materials, mentorship, and community both around research methodology and professional development to pursue critical quantitative research in the social sciences. ICQCM scholarships are fully-funded, and include both access, stipends for certain activities, and travel support for attending in-person ICQCM summits. We have in-progress research and reporting on outcomes for ICQCM scholar cohorts.
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Community
ICQCM now connects 4,000 researchers in 23 countries who promote critical quantitative and computational methodological approaches in their courses, research centers, and faculty hiring. With the launch of the Critical Quantitative “Sig” (i.e., Special Interest Group) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), this movement is now prominent enough to shape professional societies and associations.
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While ICQCM has been based primarily out of education research and the professional community of educational researchers in AERA, ICQCM is expanding to include representation from other disciplines (statistics, computer science, data science, sociology, science and technology studies).
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Future plans
Our long-term plans include expanding beyond ICQCM's current focus on providing training by cohorts. We plan to develop, and then make more widely available, training materials on critical quantitative methods (which we anticipate will include critical training in quantitative methods, as well as training in critical theories around quantification). We hope to also not only be a training institute, but also be a site of both researching what critical quantitative methods ought to be and how to carry them out, as well as both developing these methods, and applying them to specific research questions.
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We also hope to have more representation in professional communities of other disciplines (statistics, computer science, mathematics, science and technology studies, etc.), as they too seek to codify or develop their own communities of critical quantitative practitioners and critical quantitative practice.
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Last updated January 25, 2025