Short Abstract:

This roundtable explores the dynamics of making and doing, and how intervention requires divergences from STS with respect to their sociopolitical identities and commitments. The discussants are student and faculty researchers from a cultural intervention in university-based computer engineering.

Long Abstract:

This roundtable features a community of researchers transforming a nascent computer engineering department at a comprehensive public polytechnic university in the United States. All discussants–students/faculty, undergraduates/graduates, engineers/social scientists–are involved in Breaking the Binary (BtB), a cultural intervention in computer engineering that includes pedagogical, curricular, and policy-based reform. Both the computer engineering department and BtB are empowered by the potential for change during intense organizational transition: new department, new school, new grant money, and a campus-wide HSI initiative. These discussants illustrate the various motivations, dynamics, and tensions of making and doing at its most volatile and generative.

Although “STS sensibilities” inform the discussants’ practice, their articulation of making and doing explores disloyalty to STS as an institutional and political practice. The discussants experience pressure to negotiate competing political commitments because US-based STS extends colonial projects of conquest. This included the development of a trauma-informed methodology that valued withholding: a refusal to leverage one’s trauma for others’ self-actualization, a refusal to be the eaten other (hooks, 1992), and sometimes a refusal to be academic. Institutional change, decolonization, and the university create differentially experienced incommensurabilities of STS. This roundtable will do more than explore the dynamics of a making and doing project. Discussants will share their perspectives on how their sociopolitical position and commitments informs their practice–as STS, engineering education, social justice pedagogy, and critical ethnic studies–and how they develop their own dis/loyalties to the projects of STS.