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Short abstract:

In this talk, we reflect on the challenges of embedding ethical and social responsibility within a computer science core programme and ask how to chart new paths towards reflexive socio-technical knowledge production in engineering education.

Long abstract:

Despite growing public awareness around the social, political, and ethical implications of data and algorithms, the role that education plays in building just and responsible computing cultures is often overlooked within critical scholarship. As many have noted, mainstream approaches to ethics and responsible innovation within computer science training tend to treat ethics as a siloed discipline that practitioners apply to their own practice, often without deeper conceptual engagement with different skills and epistemologies. Technical training—with its emphasis on abstraction and formalism— further contributes to this sense of exceptionalism by building ideological barriers between computer science practice and social responsibility.

In this talk, we reflect on our experiences as respectively an STS scholar and a computer scientist in collaboratively designing and teaching two complementary courses within a large undergraduate Computer Science programme: an Ethics and Responsibility course and, in the term following, a group-based Project course. In 2021, we re-designed the curriculum and delivery of the Ethics and Responsibility course (which historically focused on professionalism, leadership, and individual ethics) to include a wider variety of critical perspectives on technology and society. We then used the Project course as a testbed to assess the impact of our pedagogical intervention and observe students’ understanding of social and ethical responsibility in practice. Drawing on our experience, this talk offers an in-depth reflection on the challenges of embedding socio-technical knowledge in computer science education, including the wider institutional and political arrangements that tend to disincentivize cross-boundary collaborations while maintaining demarcations between technical and social knowledge.