Studies carried out in numerous national contexts suggest that students from socio-economically impoverished backgrounds are associated with academic underachievement (Filmer & Pritchett, 1999). Some underprivileged students, however, manage to perform outstanding educational outcomes despite their adverse background. The dynamic process in which these students negotiate, adapt to, and cope with their circumstances is often referred to as ‘resilience’ (Howard et al., 1999).

During the 1990s, researchers started to explore resilience in the context of education, that is ‘academic resilience’. Accordingly, the notion of academic resilience is described as performing relatively well in school despite an adverse background (Alva, 1991; Wang et al., 1994). Several studies have found that academic resilience is associated with certain protective factors, both related to the individual and their environment (home, school, community), that modify or influence a person’s responses to adversities (Jowkar et al., 2014). Such factors are important to identify in order to understand how suitable support can be provided in order to create inclusive and equitable educational opportunities for all.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education research has a long tradition of engaging with inequalities, often related to the performance and participation of students from different genders, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds. A variety of conceptual tools have been applied to understand the uneven performance and participation in science, such as interest and taste (Anderhag et al., 2015), science capital (Archer et al., 2015) and science identity (Danielsson et al., 2023). There is also a rich literature that seeks to adapt science education in order to enhance the sense of belonging in the discipline for students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Barton & Tan, 2009). Such teaching interventions are often characterized by how they seek to bridge students’ life-worlds and science by, for example, eliciting and valuing students’ funds of knowledge. Other studies look at how minoritized students in STEM responded to challenges and develop their mathematical identities and pursue STEM career (Joseph et al., 2020). Consequently, STEM education research has been deeply invested in improving the teaching and learning for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Still, with a few notable exceptions (Ferguson & Martin‐Dunlo, 2021), this has not been conceptualized in terms of developing students’ academic resilience. We posit that an increased conversation between STEM education research seeking to improve the educational experience of disadvantaged students and research about academic resilience would be beneficial to both lines of research. Since the findings from the resilience research field are largely extracted from quantitative studies, the knowledge of how resilience is developed through the interplay between the individual and their environment is sparse.

The aim of this paper is to contribute a multifaceted exploration of an educational trajectory from childhood characterized by circumstances to doing a PhD in mathematics. The study is grounded in an interest of understanding how academic resilience be conceptualized in a way that allows for STEM-specific disciplinary aspects to be taken into account. More specifically, we ask:

- What resources (at individual/school/family/community level) were accessed by the student in order to allow for a successful educational trajectory in STEM?

We will present our preliminary results from a pilot case study of a scholar coming from Southeast Asia and now doing PhD in Mathematics at a Swedish university.