In 2025, a city-owned museum in Irving, Texas, a Dallas–Fort Worth suburb, prepared to open Badge Of Pride: From Silence…To Celebration!, an LGBTQ+ history exhibition, amid widening efforts to censor LGBTQ+ stories and limit their visibility. If anticipated objections determined its scope, language, or tone, the critics would already be curating the show.
By Isabel Hawkins, Ph.D. Abstract Informal science learning (ISL) organizations—such as science centers, children’s museums, botanical gardens, and zoos—play a key role in how the public engages with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). These free-choice environments foster curiosity, lifelong learning, and hands-on science education outside the classroom. Yet despite long-standing efforts, Latinx, among other communities, remain significantly underrepres
