Donna Riley, Virginia Tech;
Dean Nieusma, RPI

Denver 2015: STS Infrastructures

Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace (ESJP) is an international network of scholar/ practitioner-advocates seeking to transform engineering. ESJP hosts an annual international conference; has launched a ‘zine, an open-access journal, and a book series; and has served to coordinate various engineering and STS research projects, grant proposals, and collaborative scholarly presentations and publications. To a degree, ESJP could be understood as a type of STS infrastructure in itself; however, ESJP participants are careful to guard against colonization and extractive research practices by others, including but extending beyond STS. The presentation will review the achievements of ESJP as an engineering activist movement, highlighting the networks’ numerous Making and Doing outputs. Several STS and engineering studies scholars have long participated in ESJP, and this presentation will focus on their critical reflections surrounding participation in ESJP, ESJP’s successes and challenges, and the ways STS and ESJP might inform one another.