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Short abstract:

The history of the United States’ technological humanitarianism exported internationally cannot be told apart from Protestantism’s influence. This presentation describes the complexity of detangling religion from engineering for good, all while trying to respond to humanitarianisms' motivations.

Long abstract:

The history of the United States’ technological humanitarianism exported internationally cannot be told apart from Protestantism’s influence. Humanitarian aid from the United States has long been paired with Christian messaging about transcendent surplus and global deficit (Curtis, 2018). However, over the last thirty years, thousands of engineers have tried to hybridize religion and engineering work in ways that address sociotechnical concerns all over the globe while respecting varied value systems, some of which are decidedly non-religious. This paper addresses Latour (2012) and Asad’s (2003) call to engage with secularity as an important feature of post-modern critique. In practice, engineers navigate both critique and practicalities of engineering in our post-modern world. They work through deficit-based framing of development work and some aspire to design for post development’s “pluriverse” (Escobar, 2018).

But when humanitarianism is framed in secular terms, particularly when it is paired with technological interventions and engineering work, the questions of how religious motivations cleanly fall asked by theorists and practitioners alike. This historical and ethnographic piece describes the complexity of detangling religion from engineering for good work, especially in the United States. In so doing, it explains the multiple hybridizations present in higher education programming that attempts to combine technical expertise and humanitarian effort. Loosely framed in terms of how engineers engage in service, development, and social justice, this presentation describes how doing good with engineering without religion is a complicated claim, detailing how techno-optimistic efforts regarding engineering’s influence has religious undertones and a uniquely constructed secularity embedded within.