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- Convenors:
-
Rebekah Cupitt
(Birkbeck, University of London)
Elizabeth Rodwell (University of Houston)
Elizabeth Reddy (Colorado School of Mines)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Engineering and design make broad promises on sustainable, socially-responsible change. Using cases from broad-ranging fields and case studies, this panel adds to feminist and applied STS practice and asks: how do we create a space for alternative modes of responsible change?
Long Abstract:
Engineering and design offer broad promises about sustainable and responsible change and studies of these fields therefore face challenges including identifying systemic bias, observing how structural violence is scaffolded and patterns of exclusion enacted through design, and providing critical insights and detailed accounts of the impact of engineered technologies on people's everyday lives. Speed of innovation, narrowly-imagined professional roles, lack of engagement with broader contexts, and the drive to generate profit mean that promises of sustainable and socially-responsible change repeatedly fall short. Will mainstream engineers and designers effectively destabilize the impossible charisma of solutions where “everybody wins”, the mythical “universal”, or the safety of the middle-ground? What role can STS researchers play in exercising care for people (characterized in detail, as well as the broader social issues). Who's job is it to factor in multiple, potentially transformative futures at the point of development and design?
This panel includes discussions of a variety of case studies that cover topics as wide-ranging as research on critical encounters with engineering and design in classrooms, ethnographic studies of engineering and design in practice, and histories of emergence of these fields and themes. We examine the everyday work of being part of transformative efforts to educate engineers and designers about socio-cultural perspectives on their work, inspiring broader conceptions of engaged and responsible action through critical practice, rerouting teams away from harmful decisions, repairing damage done by biased design, and creating spaces for play and imagination.
Panel presenters will share material from the environmental humanities, engineering education, arts-based research, cultural anthropology, critical data studies and more. All will address a core question developed in the context of ongoing conversations related to feminist, applied, and critical STS: how can STS scholars help carve out a space where alternative modes of engineering and design can operate?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Elizabeth Reddy (Colorado School of Mines)
Long abstract:
In engineering education, there is a substantial preoccupation with instrumentality of coursework. This orientation is the topic of significant discussion in engineering studies and STS more broadly as we seek to characterize and navigate the ways that we encounter, reproduce and undermine certain received forms of subjectivity and notions of knowledge.
In this paper, I consider how instrumentalism has cast education as a tool; a means to an end. I describe this as a double move: first, valuing direct and practical utility above all in coursework, and second, setting this value work within a particularly constrained and often techno-chauvenistic set of notions about what ends are worth moving toward and the means by which such ends might be achieved. I argue that we would do well to take the notion of the “instrument” seriously to better understand engineering education and the work of STS scholars and educators within it. I draw on the work of anthropologists to consider how tools are formed by and come to form the bodies of their makers, users, and the worlds around them to do this. Using my own teaching for reference, I demonstrate what thinking about instrumentalism from this embodied and material stance can show us about engineering classrooms and how STS scholars participate critically in them.
Megan K. Halpern (Michigan State University) Emily York (James Madison University) David Tomblin (University of Maryland College Park) Nicole Mogul (University of Maryland College Park) Marie Stettler Kleine (Colorado School of Mines) Elizabeth Reddy (Colorado School of Mines) Marisa Brandt Shannon Conley
Short abstract:
This paper addresses the role of STS teacher-scholars in STEM education and the development of plans for An STS Teachbook: Recipes from our Science and Technology Studies Communities for Critical Pedagogies in Undergraduate Education.
Long abstract:
Many scholars in STS find ourselves teaching future scientists, engineers, and medical professionals far more often than we teach future STS scholars. This can make developing engaging learning opportunities challenging. Educators must create classroom experiences that promote critical approaches to science and technology for students often reluctant to critique the sociotechnical infrastructures they hope one day to join. The result is a host of creative curricula that have the potential to challenge and inspire students and even to enrich scholarship in STS. However, the politics of higher education lead to certain challenges: we lose track of insights generated in the classroom and fail to share this work broadly, leaving crucial labor of our community unrecognized. Further, the ways our knowledge is performed, produced, and circulated in classrooms and with students remains under theorized.
This presentation will address the authors' work to build a new resource: An STS Teachbook: Recipes from our Science and Technology Studies Communities for Critical Pedagogies in Undergraduate Education. This Teachbook will include STS scholarship and compile “recipes” for different learning experiences developed in our communities. We will preview the Teachbook, explore the organizing themes, and share several recipes (including an improvisational activity related to the social, political, and ethical dimensions of sociotechnical artifacts, and a framing activity using guided analysis of op-eds and maps). With this project, we build a resource to recognize our community’s labor, a tool to support our ongoing efforts, and a contribution to developing better understanding of STS in practice.
Rebekah Cupitt (Birkbeck, University of London)
Long abstract:
Becoming a part of the capitalist Silicon Valley dream has long been a student goal that educators on design programmes either embrace or rile against using agile, critical, socially responsible, or human-centred design frameworks. With its elitist culture and technocratic capitalist visions of the future, big tech still offers a brighter future for those that manage to make the cut. In the UK, international students see digital design as a pathway to improved socio-economic status, in contrast to a lifetime of exploitation and resource extraction which mainly benefits citizens in the Global North. However, teaching design principles and methods that champion standardised toolkits to students with a variety of goals, risks reproducing and codifying a fixed set of normative values in technologies that extend into its implementation and use. This paper uses a mix of ethnographic insights on how the design of video meeting technologies re-enact bias and a reflection on how well current design approaches such as speculative critical design and inclusive design address these issues. Considering experiences in the classroom, I question how well these existing methods work to create sufficiently expansive spaces in which students can engage with socially responsibile design, while also speaking to their individual goals and visions for their futures. Finally this paper looks at the different definitions of design justice that emerge among students and how to teach to these multiplicities as students become-with design methodologies.
Elizabeth Rodwell (University of Houston)
Long abstract:
In this presentation, our team will talk about our current interdisciplinary initiative, uniting the University of Houston’s College of Engineering and College of the Arts to innovate within the realm of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) museum exhibitions. This collaboration seeks to harness the educational and technological potential of AR/VR technologies to revolutionize how museum exhibits are created, curated, and experienced. By integrating artifacts from the University of Houston's collections into novel AR/VR environments, the project offers students a unique opportunity to engage with the cutting-edge of digital exhibit design. It also requires both an engineering and a design mindset to make it happen.
Digital humanities researchers, artists, and technologists are all currently exploring the implications of AR/VR in museum spaces beyond mere spectacle. They are delving into the artistic, museum, and curatorial processes, enhancing their skills in 3D scanning, modeling, and AR/VR content creation. This endeavor challenges our students to navigate the complexities of designing virtual exhibits, from curatorial decision-making to technical execution, fostering a comprehensive understanding of both virtual and physical curation.
Central to this project is the integration of user experience research, particularly through eye tracking within VR environments, to glean insights into visitor interactions and preferences. This aspect underscores the project's innovative approach to understanding the impact of design and curatorial choices on audience engagement. We argue that collaborations of this type, although not always rewarded by individual disciplines, serve as models for arts and engineering collaboration beyond the classroom.