Social Justice: A Missing, Unelaborated Dimension in Humanitarian Engineering and Learning Through Service

Abstract

-Negotiations between engineering and non-engineering perspectives are central in humanitarian engineering and learning through service initiatives, and these negotiations inevitably include dimensions of social justice. But what frameworks guide engineers through such negotiations? To date, in published scholarship, social justice has played little to no role in providing structure for work in humanitarian engineering and learning through service. Yet structure is needed to think and act systematically on the social justice dimensions inherent in humanitarian engineering and learning through service initiatives and practices. Drawing from multiple data sources, including interviews with engineering education faculty on the barriers and opportunities to integrating social justice dimensions in such initiatives, we provide a social justice definition and criteria that serve as flexible guidelines for humanitarian engineering and learning through service initiatives. Grounded in a synthesized definition of social justice, the social justice criteria can guide engineers to recognize and map human and non-human, engineering and non-engineering components in problem definition and solution-with social justice at the core. Along with other benefits, these criteria can act as a foundation from which to launch, evaluate, and improve on humanitarian engineering and learning through service work, serving as a vehicle for project initiation, reflection, and self-critique.Index Terms -humanitarian engineering, learning through service, social justice criteria, social justice applications.With great power, comes great responsibility. Engineering has the power to transform the world: the water we drink, air we breath, infrastructure we use for energy and transport, medicines we use for healing, way we conduct warfare and peace, and much, much more. Given the power of engineering, we need an engineering education that is tailored to the great responsibility engineers will assume in transforming life in the 21st century and beyond. Engineers design, build and operate simple and complex systems, capable of affecting the lives of millions of people, as well as the allocation of resources (e.g., water), opportunities (e.g., access to work and commerce), risks and harms (e.g., flooding), and how diverse social groups receive these differently. Consider the devastation that took place in New Orleans in 2005. When the levees-an engineered infrastructure system-failed, one can see that when a natural hazard, like Hurricane Katrina, interacts with engineered systems on which people's lives depend, the consequences are different for different groups of people. In the case of Katrina, the failure of the levees in New Orleans affected the poor (mostly black) and those with disabilities more than any other social groups, taking away their resources (e.g., property), opportunities (e.g., to rest and replenish at home so one can be a functional member of society) while exposing them to more risks and harms (e.g., disease, drowning, ...

Front Matter

“…His guidance was crucial in shaping Chapter 2 on engineering design, which was informed by an earlier paper we wrote with Dean on design for social justice [1]. We are grateful to the International Journal of Service Learning in Engineering for the right to excerpt portions of an article inspired by our collaboration with Dean [2]. Thanks also go to the American Society for Engineering Education for allowing us to excerpt from conferences papers, informing Chapters 2 [1], 3 [3], [4], and 4 [5], which have now been substantively revised from earlier work.…”

Soap-Making Process Improvement: Including Social, Cultural and Resource Constraints in the Engineering Design Process

“…Although engineering for social impact has been gaining interest in universities, many programs still heavily focus on the technical aspects of engineering design, with limited engagement in social matters and/or cross-cultural contexts 14 . There are a number of USA and overseas universities with formal academic programs in humanitarian engineering or engineering for global development programs (e.g.…”

“…Unlike traditional senior capstone teams, this team assessed the project parameters using the six Social Justice (SJ) criteria outlined by Leydens and Lucena in 2014 47 . The SJ criteria include: listening contextually, identifying structural conditions, acknowledging political agency/mobilizing power, increasing opportunities and resources, reducing imposed risks and harms, and enhancing human capabilities.…”

Engineering to Help Communities or Students’ Development? An ethnographic case study of an engineering-to-help student organization

“…21 The program now revolves around engineering for sustainable community development and social justice. 22,23 Many of the courses are critical of the top-down approaches to community development characteristic of the ETH organizations and projects described above, and instead train students to work with communities to co-create solutions that are socially just and sustainable. Many, but not all members of MWB are involved in the HE program in some capacity, through enrolling in the minor or taking a few courses.…”