As a predominantly white and male discipline, engineering is influenced by dominant discourses created by Whiteness. Whiteness in engineering transcends demographics; it influences norms, values, and practices, and it works as a mechanism that perpetuates biases and historical privileges that favor white individuals, affecting access, opportunities, and representation. Terms like meritocracy, objectivity, and masculinity are often used in engineering education research without addressing Whiteness as the systemic issue sustaining these ideologies. This paper employs a counternarrative to reveal how Whiteness is central to systemic barriers in engineering. Through a critical perspective on Whiteness, we describe instances in which Whiteness permeates engineering culture, maintaining its dominance and preventing the validation of diverse epistemologies. By highlighting one faculty member's experience, we explore more broadly how Whiteness manifests in engineering in U.S. higher education. Our analysis suggests that Whiteness leads to epistemic exclusion and diminishes the professional autonomy of faculty of color. In particular, this counternarrative shows how Whiteness forces faculty of color to constantly operate from a place of fear.
This paper investigates the drivers behind the institutionalization of engineering ethics at the national level through a comparative study of the United States and the Netherlands. The study examines the historical evolution and current landscape of engineering ethics activities in both countries. By comparing emergence, process, and actor involvement dimensions, commonalities and differences between the two nations' approaches to the institutionalization of engineering ethics are identified. The analysis reveals context-specific factors shaping engineering ethics policies, including the nature of the profession, technological challenges, and societal attributes. The study identifies common drivers for national engineering ethics development: external influences such as technological crises and societal debates, contextual forces like institutional dynamics and societal attributes, and the triple helix of academia, professional associations, and government relations. The findings may offer useful insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to enhance engineering ethics.
This paper examines how senior male engineering faculty at a Swedish technical university who have introduced gender knowledge into engineering coursework position this knowledge in relation to engineering knowledge, and what such positionings mean for change efforts. Drawing on positioning theory and interviews with program directors and course coordinators-who are neither feminist scholars nor formally expected to engage with gender knowledge-we identify two competing discourses shaping their positionings. One constructs gender knowledge as separate from engineering knowledge, framing it as non-technical and ideological. The other integrates gender knowledge, framing it as practical or transformational. Our central finding is that ambivalence characterizes these men's engagement. Rather than indicating lack of awareness or resistance, ambivalence reflects productive tensions that can constrain deeper engagement but also foster what is labeled knowledge-curiosity, reflection, and openings for incremental change. This study advances research on gender and engineering education by showing how ambivalence operates as a productive but unstable mode of engaging with contested knowledge in androcentric academic cultures.
This report documents the 2025 program of the Liberal Education/Engineering and Society (LEES) Division at the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), held June 22-25, 2025 in Montreal, Canada. We discuss the how the Division's planned themes - sociotechnical integration, truth and reconciliation in engineering, engineering and climate change, and engineering and conflict - were reflected in the program, and highlight an emergent theme of 'critical mutuality' that developed during the conference itself. Finally, we reflect on the relationship between the LEES Division and its constituent scholarly communities of engineering studies and engineering education.
This report documents the roundtable 'Making STS Reverberate through Engineering: Reflections on Engineering Studies', hosted by the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES) at the 2025 Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) meeting in Seattle. The roundtable examined engineering studies as a field and its relationship to Science and Technology Studies (STS), exploring how STS-informed scholarship shapes engineering research, education, and practice. Participants discussed critical questions about reciprocal learning: How do our analyses of engineering cultures shape the engineers we research and teach? What impact do engineering perspectives have on STS scholarship? The roundtable began a discussion of practices in STS-informed engineering studies, including historical, cultural, political, and ethical analyses of engineers and their work, as well as interdisciplinary research collaborations and their effects on engineering students, research participants, and scholars.
This article presents the first large scale quantitative study on the issue of female retention in the Irish context. In this examination of what drives women to persist or leave the industry, we identify factors such as demographics, employment conditions and workplace issues that play a role in determining the scale of Ireland's attrition problem for female engineers. The scale of experiences of sexism amongst respondents is presented as are some surprising findings on the lack of the relevance of pay or stress in determining whether a woman persists or leaves engineering. This article also presents findings on a new novel group within scholarship on female retention in engineering: women who have considered leaving. Almost half of the respondents still working in engineering have considered leaving the industry. As such, this article presents their experiences to address the knowledge gap on occupational commitment of women still employed as engineers and, in doing so, adds nuance to the categorizations of women who leave and women who persist. Arguably, paying attention to the experiences and needs of women who have considered leaving is where the most immediate and impactful interventions can be made to prevent female attrition in engineering in Ireland.
Responsibility is a core concept for engineering ethics, yet it is often used ambiguously and is subject to various interpretations. Given that the mission statements of engineering higher education institutions, accreditation requirements, and engineering professional codes are built on a language of responsibility, it is important to have a structured approach that includes its evolving dimensions. This article surveys the engineering ethics literature to identify historical developments and develop a conceptual framework for defining the diverse responsibilities engineers have qua engineers. This conceptual framework categorizes engineering responsibilities at four analytical levels (Micro/Macro and Subject/Object). Micro-Subject responsibilities address the values, characteristics, and decision-making of individual engineers. Micro-Object responsibilities address the values, characteristics, and culture of organizations where an engineer practices. Macro-Subject responsibilities address the values, mission and decision-making of the engineering profession or collectives. Macro-Object responsibilities address the social, economic and political structures and context driving engineering practice. The framework provides a practical tool for engineering curriculum development and accreditation processes by providing clear formulations for setting learning objectives and graduate attributes that support the embedding of responsibility across the curriculum and across accreditation requirements.
To promote climate justice, we need to do things - including renewable energy projects - differently. Scholars and activists from Moana (the Pacific) have long called for attention to Indigenous ontologies in research, policy, and projects, but there are limited empirical accounts showing how such ontologies might operate in practice. Our ethnographic account of a recent, interdisciplinary collaboration on a renewable energy project in S & amacr;moa extends the practice architectures framework to explore the social dynamics at play as a caring machine is assembled in Oceania. Our findings, and possibly our collaboration itself, suggest an alternative renewable energy imaginary is already under construction and will be of interest to engineering studies, energy social science, critical development studies, and transdisciplinary Pacific studies.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are advancing rapidly, yet their development remains opaque, particularly in terms of the collaborative practices that shape their design. This article presents findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a Tokyo-based conversational AI startup, supplemented by interviews with conversation designers and engineers (n = 20) working across major global tech companies. It examines how usability determinations emerge through daily negotiation between these actors and identifies two recurring modes of dialog navigated by conversation design professionals: one focused on the emotional and pragmatic needs of users, and another grounded in engineering constraints and assumptions about technical feasibility. Many conversation design and UX professionals hold academic training in the social sciences, and their work requires the ongoing translation of humanistic concepts into engineering language. While current conversation design remains largely human-authored, the balance between scripted dialog and generative AI continues to evolve. I argue that conversation designers' social science expertise is central to how AI systems come to feel 'human.' Bridging literatures in user experience (UX), human-computer interaction (HCI), and science and technology studies (STS), this article addresses gaps between humanities/social science and engineering research cultures, advocating for more integrative scholarship that reflects the collaborative realities of AI development.
This essay aims to craft the groundwork for re-engineering environmental engineering in/of the Anthropocene. Reflecting on experimental fieldwork in Muaragembong, Indonesia, raises the question of designing for water infrastructures for more-than-human beings and sets the stage for retracing the colonial origins and the postcolonial trajectory of environmental engineering in the postcolonial state. It concludes with a critical review of the current curriculum of environmental engineering at a technical university.
Artificial intelligence (AI) design traditionally prioritizes full automation and broadest data coverage yet often overlooks the contextual realities of pre-existing biases in datasets and human agency in real-world applications. This article explores how cross-disciplinary collaboration can transform this paradigm by opening AI's 'black box' of full automation to public accountability, human operation and real-world use. Based on anthropologists' direct collaboration with computer scientists in a machine learning (ML) AI design project, this project proposes cross-disciplinary methodological innovations for algorithm design and takes up the fairness issue as an exemplary domain to experiment with our new ML model framework. We developed a new ML framework that moves beyond conventional accuracy-coverage trade-offs to incorporate a human-operable three-way balance between accuracy, fairness, and coverage. In this framework, we foreground the real-world contexts and human agency at multiple stages of AI design, from data training, decision-making, interface design to model testing. The results demonstrate both the promise and challenges of bridging academic disciplines and connecting lab-based AI development with real-world needs. While our collaboration has made AI design more accountable, it also highlights enduring tensions in balancing competing priorities like fairness, accuracy, and coverage.
Participation in national professional associations is a common strategy for self-distinction. Since 1919, some Australian engineers have joined a national association, affirming agreement to align with its code of ethics. Yet, recent scholarship shows that markers of merit and virtue are not just about quality work: they also support the production of hierarchical difference. Framed by this interest, I describe how codes of ethics construct the meanings of responsible engineering. Specifically, I compare the changing contents within Australia's trajectory of codes between 1919 and 2022. What counts as responsible practice? What are constructed as opportunities and threats to engineering 'professionalism'? How should a practitioner engage with questions of appropriate technology and public critiques of technoscience? Content analysis reveals a density of emphasis upon etiquette rules for relationships between peers and clients. I argue that this infuses responsible professionalism with class-specific loyalties that could more readily serve to dampen, rather than amplify, critiques of engineering's wider harms. Although codes from 1966 to 2022 add a new language of aims that discursively acknowledges critique of engineering's harms, for the entire arc of Australia's codes, gatekeeping the edges of the profession remains obligatory, in what I call a 'historical class politics of expertise'.
This paper presents a critical reflection on interdisciplinary collaborations that seek to guide technical application by applying explanatory theory. It proposes that quotidian aspects of disciplinary specialization can present obstacles to interdisciplinary collaborations. This refers not to highly abstruse theory or complex techniques, but rather to the disciplinary lore and taken for granted assumptions that students and faculty trained in discrete fields master informally and articulate effortlessly. As a remedy it suggests sharing accounts of disciplinary lore at the outset and across the breadth of collaborative work. As an illustration, it develops several historical narratives of collaborations between computer scientists and anthropologists, from cybernetics in the mid twentieth century to a twenty-first century project combining the explanatory theory of human behavioral ecology with human computer interaction.
This Report analyzes the reasons engineering researchers give for accepting new knowledge developed by other researchers. The evidence comes from about one hundred researchers from the United States, Europe, and Latin America, who responded to a questionnaire. To attempt to discern patterns in the responses, the participants were placed in groups according to their research experience, as measured by their h-index of citations. The results were consistent in all groups considered, and indicate a clear trend in favor of methodological reasons. Answers related to the novelty of the new knowledge reached an intermediate level of preference. The lowest preferences were related to the prestige of the authors or their institution, or the previous acceptance of this knowledge by important researchers in the field.
Historically, engineers have been trained to adopt a neutral and apolitical stance, reinforcing a 'culture of disengagement' in the field that influences who chooses to pursue engineering. This study examines how first-year engineering students experience a sociotechnical curriculum designed to introduce them to the social, political, and economic dimensions of engineering. Guided by Cech's culture of disengagement in engineering, the research investigates how students engage in a sociotechnical curricular revision in an introductory engineering course. Using a reflexive thematic analysis, I analyze students' project proposals, final reports, and post-semester interviews. Findings reveal that students engaged deeply with the curriculum by connecting course themes to their own experiences, interests, and identities. Many reflected on personal bias, real-world inequities, and the limitations of purely technical solutions. Rather than devaluing the social aspects of real-world contexts, students highlighted how equity and power dynamics shaped their project decisions and reflections giving them more insight into how engineering decisions might impact people differently. This work shows that sociotechnical curricula can challenge disengagement by creating space for engineering students, especially those historically excluded from engineering, to bring their perspectives and experiences into a culture of engagement that better reflects the complexity and responsibility of engineering practice.
