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.