Cultivating solidarity for action on social justice in engineering

Abstract

As graduate students, we have witnessed and experienced firsthand how engineering education, due to engineering culture, can perpetuate harm and enhance systemic oppression and inequality in society. Documenting our efforts to counteract this status-quo, we share our individual and collective experience working to center social justice in engineering education. Using collaborative autoethnography, we qualitatively explore, through self-reflection, how we sought to integrate social justice into engineering education and developed a praxis of engineering social justice. Our group’s collaboratively developed praxis of engineering social justice seeks to overcome institutional and individual barriers to an integration of social justice in engineering practice by 1) fostering a reflexive practice through values and positionality, 2) engineering space for inclusive collaboration, and 3) seeing justice as a necessary lens for engineering education. Through this analysis of our personal experience, we hope to motivate and challenge readers to develop a praxis of engineering social justice that will inform their actions in this space.

Frame plurality and ‘or/rationality’: a dialogic approach to the behavioral state

“…Achieving this form of justice, in essence, requires that individuals are entitled to equal entry to and benefits from options, are free from asymmetric applications of any 'market tax' that extracts extra investment to fit in, andperhaps most importantlythat justice is not achieved through individual bootstrapping but through infrastructural and systems-level design. This view aligns with emergent feminist and antiracist stances that recognize the degree to which power and privilege are often embedded into hard and soft infrastructures supporting decision-making and choice (Dombrowski et al, 2016;Constanza-Chock, 2020;Carroll et al, 2022), such as the 'view from nowhere' common to social planner approaches that positions an all-knowing, all-seeing, but unsituated perspective as a mechanism to judge rational choice (Koehn, 1998). While at best, this can be benignly paternalistic, at worst, it can yield perverse solutions, as when Robert Moses embedded privilege into New York City's hard infrastructure to prevent bus-reliantand typically lower-classpopulations from traveling to the seashore by making bridge clearances en route too low for buses to pass (Winner, 1980).…”

Learning From Failure: Reinvention of a Service-Learning Praxis in a Community-Engaged Engineering Design Course

“…Therefore, not only is there an opportunity to enhance our own engineering servicelearning design courses, but perhaps also to humbly share strategies and best practices about our critical service-learning journey such that others can learn from or even avoid our failures. Additionally, reflective praxis can help center social justice in engineering education (Carroll et al, 2022). The path to doing critical service-learning is not a straight line.…”