September 20, 2021 | Report-Backs
In June 2021, members of the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES) coordinated the virtual workshop “Living in a Crisis Moment: Empirical Research, Social Action, and Mentorship in Engineering Studies.” The workshop brought together junior and senior scholars to consider how the pandemic, the global movement for racial justice, the slow disaster of climate change, and other aspects of our current “crises moment” require and inspire us to reflect on our work.
This report-back focuses on one part of the INES workshop: a session titled “How We Build: Feminist and Anti-Racist Practices in Engineering Studies.” Past work in Engineering Studies directs our attention to engineering spaces that have been productively critiqued within our community of STS scholars for their practices of inclusion and exclusion, particularly along gendered and racialized lines. As we pursue equity and justice through our scholarship, we confront the reality that, while the spaces we occupy professionally as researchers, teachers, and writers may not be the same ones we study, they often exhibit analogous discriminatory and even violent effects. How, then, can we build in ways that minimize harm to our colleagues, collaborators, interlocutors, and mentees? What models do we have to do so? What matters and what works? The panel addressed these questions through breakout discussions that focused on sharing tools, techniques, and experiences of building feminist and anti-racist practices into Engineering Studies scholarship. The breakout groups were categorized as “teaching,” “research,” and “publishing”; however, all of the session participants quickly noted the artificiality of these distinctions. We found frequent overlaps and commonalities between the topics and the breakout discussions, some of which we have tried to capture here.
Teaching
One breakout group reflected on feminist and anti-racist practices in the classroom. Throughout our conversation, participants circled back to preventing harm as a part of classroom inclusion, anti-racist, and feminist interventions. The group focused on both specific classroom activities such as engaging conversations about “positionality” at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, guided visualization as an opportunity for students and faculty to picture their ideal, anti-oppressive engineering workplace, and how to organize better semi-structured classroom discussions led by students. Both instructors and students provided their perspectives more broadly about the benefits, drawbacks, and potential areas of improvement when thinking about making injustices and inequalities visible in engineering classrooms.
A handful of participants of this INES session were continuing conversations that they had shared as a part of the ongoing “STS as a Critical STS Pedagogy Workshop” that took place in weekly installments throughout June and July 2021. We look forward to the continued engagement of this group of instructors, with an eye towards collectively highlighting how classrooms are a critical space for interventions, alongside research and institutional service.
Research
A second breakout group took research as its focus. The main themes were visibility and responsibility: What is at stake when we study and encourage the visibility of minoritized groups within engineering through our research? How and why have efforts to increase participation and visibility developed? What can we learn from attempts to make inequity and marginalization visible? Both presentations focused on women as a minoritized group in engineering, though participants in the subsequent discussion also spoke about marginalization due to race, religion, and other forms of categorization. Amy Bix presented work from her current book project, which examines the history of efforts to promote girls’ involvement in STEM fields. Annie Patrick presented her podcast project, Engineering Visibility, which showcases people and ideas that often go unseen within Virginia Tech’s Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The discussion focused on the tension between visibility and harm prevention. Efforts to highlight marginalized voices often also subject them to increased scrutiny, which can be harmful. As researchers, we can use a wide range of approaches and methods to question dominant narratives and center the perspectives of minoritized groups. As we do this, we must consider our responsibilities to our research collaborators and participants and the different safety concerns that different methods and outputs present (e.g. historical analysis vs. podcasting).
Publication
What are we publishing, what does that mean for scholars, how should we change the mechanisms, and what are the stakes? The third breakout group reflected on opportunities and challenges in publication. Juan Lucena led us to consider what gets published in Engineering Studies and argued that there are real needs to consider research articles as teaching tools, and encouraged us to publish material that represented engineering practices outside of the mainstream US norms. Here we also encountered and reflected on James Holly, Jr.’s recent consideration of the work that Black scholars often need to do in order to prove their competence and the neglect of their expertise by reviewers. Finally, Kristen Moore introduced us to an anti-racist tool for reviewers and editors that she has been involved in developing.
This work, taken together, helps us understand our writing and reviewing as part of a larger system of action and performance—not just as the kind of renderings of our research or deployments of our expertise to evaluate others, undertaken alone at our desks under the pressure of deadlines and annual reviews. This is how we produce and reproduce important aspects of professional sociality. As we talk about transformations and new modes of being, we must address publication systematically.
Themes and Conclusions
Three themes were apparent across all breakout groups and our collective, concluding discussion. The first was the importance of active commitment to harm prevention as we seek to build in Engineering Studies. Using explicitly anti-racist and feminist tools, integrating trauma-informed approaches, and maintaining awareness of our own potential blind spots can help us avoid building structural discrimination into our attempts to change the status quo. The second theme was the importance of building inter-generationally. The workshop intentionally grouped senior academics with more junior scholars. We saw repeatedly that some of the most important insights came from students or interactions between students and their more senior colleagues. It is important for faculty committed to justice and inclusion in engineering studies to work with students as co-thinkers without placing the burden of responsibility on their shoulders. Finally, we noted the productiveness of using categories – in our case, teaching, research, and publishing—while recognizing the connections and relations between them. Seeing the work of building engineering studies in all aspects of our scholarship can fuel and inspire us.
Kari Zacharias is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Engineering Professional Practice and Engineering Education at the University of Manitoba. Her background is in engineering and STS, and her work focuses on the intersections and spaces between these two fields. Her research interests include inter- and transdisciplinarity, epistemic cultures of engineering, and STS pedagogies for engineering environments. She is grateful to have served as a pinch-hit moderator for this excellent panel.
Marie Stettler Kleine is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering, Design, & Society at the Colorado School of Mines. Kleine conducts research on normative values of engineering and innovation. She teaches courses in humanitarian engineering, engineering design, and science and technology studies. One of her happiest places is facilitating the exchange of expertise, which is what drew her to co-moderating the featured INES panel.
Elizabeth Reddy is an Assistant Professor of Engineering, Design, & Society at Colorado School of Mines and a core faculty member in the Humanitarian Engineering Program, and holds a joint appointment in Geophysics. Trained as a cultural anthropologist and STS researcher, she studies how engineers and scientists live with environmental hazards and risk mitigation technologies. She was honored to hear from and speak with the participants and moderators of this panel. She tweets at @beth_reddy
Published: 09/20/2021