Skye Niles, Shawhin Roudbari, Jill Harrison, Jessica Kaminsky, and Santina Contreras
This workshop will focus on generating knowledge of engineering’s history of engagement in social justice, as well envisioning what the future of engineering could look like if social justice and peace were core values within the discipline. Engineering is a heterogeneous practice, but the social components of engineering are often marginalized. Likewise, engineering is often framed as apolitical work, yet this obscures the ways that engineering has political consequences for people and the planet, and erases the history of activism within engineering. In this creative workshop, the facilitator will engage participants in interactive activities and discussion about the different ways that engineers have participated and can participate in social justice work. We will explore these ideas through small and large group discussions, writing, and drawing. The facilitator will have large format prints of statements, images, and infographics that participants will be invited to mark up, caption, and draw upon to generate ideas and examples of social justice work, as well as visions for what an engineering centered in social justice could look like. We will also explore some of the challenges of defining social justice, such as distinctions between “helping” and working for justice. With participants’ agreement, we will take the ideas generated through this workshop back to our home institution, where we will work with an artist to develop these themes into illustrations and mini-comics that will be distributed to ESJP participants for their use. In this way, we seek to bridge borders between art, storytelling, and engineering. We aim for this workshop to broaden understanding of the history and possibilities of social justice in engineering, and for the comics and illustrations generated from this workshop to be used to reach young engineers early in their education, so that social justice is part of their first conceptions of engineering.
Materials for this workshop can be found here: