“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is a like a tree without its roots.”

— Marcus Garvey

A collage of black and white images depicting qualitative research

Research

Publications

Wittmann, Beth; Schmidt, Jenne. “Environmentalism and Euro-Western Eradication Narratives.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Disability Studies. Ed. Jenifer Barclay. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Eddy S. L., S. Ahler, E. March, L. Gutierrez, T. Schlechter, O. Turner, B. Wittmann, A. K. Lane, A.M. Aramati Casper. 2026. “There is a Place for Us Here”: Exploring Sex, Gender, Reproduction, Sexual Behavior, and Orientation Narratives Supporting Students With Queer Genders in Biology Courses.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.70043.

Wittmann, B., & Garrity, D. (2025). Sick of the City: Unpacking the Fat Body Politics of Wilderness. Environment and History, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.3828/whpeh.63861480345888

Martin, D. J., C. R. Bycenski, B. A. Wittmann, D. L. Jacobs, J. R. Milford, C. L. Aldridge, and L. L. Bailey. 2015. Lampropeltis holbrooki, Speckled Kingsnake: Geographic Distribution. Herpetological Review 46(1):62.

In Review

Wittmann B., G. Poitra, J. Schmidt, D. Garrity, L. Schneider. “I wanted to have some sort of solution”: Experiences of neurodiverse graduate students in STEM.

Wittmann, B and D. Garrity. “Fat in Nature: Narratives of exclusion and resistance from the margins of American outdoor culture.”

Beth's CV

Held Together Live Events and Podcast

A podcast and project about disabled life, care work, and the everyday magic of interdependence. From their bed, Xander Peer Keller, invites you into conversations that are intimate, messy, and beautiful about the relationships that sustain their life and create their care web.

Click here to learn more about what a care web is.

We explore how pain can become a portal, how queerness and disability carry their own magic, and how being held together is more powerful than holding it all alone. Live virtual events with guests are recorded and produced as podcast episodes.

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Inclusive and Innovative Social Justice Pedagogy

A screenshot of the article written about Beth's co-designed graduate course

In the Fall of 2022 at Colorado State University, Beth and two fellow graduate students, Marina Rodriguez and Amir Alayoubi (pictured left), ran their course about social justice and science for the first time.

After hearing the desires of biology graduate students to explore social justice at a deeper level in the spring of 2021, Beth put together a syllabus and asked Marina and Amir to help create a new graduate course. They co-developed the class material over the summer and had about 20 students from all different STEM departments sign up for that first fall.

In 2025, Beth is co-instructing the course for the 4th time and maintaining a space for the deep exploration of systems of oppression in STEM, inclusive pedagogy, accessibility in practice, community building, and activism.

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Student Testimonials

  • "Many courses that focus on one topic often provide more in-depth coverage of a particular “-ism”, but don’t take the time to relate them to the bigger pictures, and often stop just short of addressing capitalism or other underlying structures. This class has not been afraid to tackle that, and it was very refreshing!"

    —Biology PhD Student

  • "I have taken other DEIJ workshops/attended seminars, but have never learned as much as I have in this class. I appreciate how sometimes brutally honest this class is; there is no sugar coating the harsh realities of not only history, but culture/environment today."

    —Toxicology PhD Student

  • "I am so excited to go to class every week! I think I’ve lost some of the excitement and curiosity I entered grad school with, and I really appreciate this class and all of your work for awakening that part of me again. "

    —Statistics PhD Student

  • "The progression of learning and interacting with the material has really enhanced my ability to not only absorb the material but to also draw broad connections across the different modules in the class...I feel like taking this course has really helped me reconnect with my desire to do scientific research that has social justice components. I really feel that I cannot understate how much I feel that taking this course played a role in me insisting on being involved in the social advocacy work that goes along with the quantitative work I will be doing."

    —Mathematics Masters Student

  • "I really enjoy having the historical content. It's difficult material to hear sometimes, but I think it's important information for us to have. We need to know how we got here so we know how to move forward."

    —Biology PhD Student

  • "This class taught me more than any DEIJ workshop or course I’ve ever attended/taken – maybe because of how in-depth you all went into each subject or maybe because you all approached teaching these topics in a different ways. I surprised myself by shifting my worldview on certain concepts (such as sex and gender, especially how to biologically define the two terms) more so than I’ve ever done before."

    —Biology PhD Student

  • "I think the biggest reflection that I will take away from this class that I will continue to never not be able to see now is just how interconnected everything is. I was used to the idea that oppression almost always if not always can be traced back to anti-black racism and white supremacy, but still failed to see just how pervasive the people and ideas have been and still are. This class provided tools and topics for me to see names/constructs/ways of talking that are ‘red flags’ for oppression in science when I am reading work and conducting my own work."

    —Psychology PhD Student

  • "Thanks so much for putting this class together. It's been really helpful to me in becoming more aware of these biases and oppressive forces that create obstacles for people of certain identities. Your care for the content & people who are in these positions is obvious."

    —Biology PhD Student

  • "I enjoyed all of Beth’s presentations and I really enjoyed being guided through the nitty gritty of it all. I think it was important to do those deep dives for sure. I also liked being able to choose which kinds of resources I looked at before class."

    —Cellular and Molecular Biology Masters Student

  • "I have absolutely loved the lectures with slides of information. I knew nothing about any of the stuff we talked about. I was always shocked. I think you all have done a great job at explaining key points to us. Your passion in the class really comes out and it makes it even more enjoyable.”

    —Ecology PhD Student

  • "I can see myself becoming more critical. I’ve learned how to ask questions such as “who is using for these ideas and why? What sort of people or organizations are asking which research questions? How does culture influence science, and how does science influence policy decisions? Because I am learning to ask these questions, I feel more confident that I will be able to decipher when science is being used as a mechanism to evert power over others versus uplift people.”

    —Physics PhD Student

Herd Mentality Keynote

Watch the first 3 minutes below:

US conservation history is typically retold from a Western perspective and has established iconic figures as founders who came to prominence during the conception of the conservation movement. However, another immensely impactful movement was growing concurrently in the US, eugenics.

In this interactive lecture, the historical conservation figures who supported eugenics are profiled to expose how eugenics and conservation both aimed to engineer a future in which white American settlers would dominate the land through a logic of elimination. I argue that eugenic logics have always been and continue to be a part of the conservation movement.

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