Schedule
| Monday August 12 | ||
| 16:00-18:00 | Welcome for online participants + 20 years of ESJP (Caroline Baillie) | |
| Tuesday August 13 | ||
| 16:00-18:00 | Parallel special sessions: Special Session OA: Virtual Reality Peacebuilding in the Holy Lands of Palestine and Israel. Robert Wertz Special Session OB: Gender in our Lives. Ayush Gupta | |
| Thursday August 15 | ||
| 16:00-17:00 | Parallel contribution sessions (English and Spanish) | |
| 17:00-18:00 | Special Session OC: Engineering Equity with Jade Lab. Sydney Turner, Maggie Salomonsky, Patrick Hancock, and Bethany Gordon Hoy | |
Welcome session for online participants (Monday 16.00-18.00)
- 16:00-17:00: Getting to know each other, community practice and conference details.
- 17:00-18:00: 20 years of ESJP (Caroline Baillie)
A workshop which frames the past 20 years of ESJP and celebrates our 20th anniversary! The workshop would support a discussion on the following themes:- ESJP commitments, values and vision
- Historical development of our community , problems, pitfalls, passing through the liminal space!
- Creating a community of practice as new members arrive across ages, cultures, contexts, sectors, disciplines and more
We will start with a talking circle using contemplative practices and develop themes of discussion using a variety of critical pedagogical tools. We can include consideration of how the process of learning is as important as the content. How we enhance social justice and peace, how we build community, how we support one another in our struggles.
Special sessions
Special Session OA: Virtual Reality Peacebuilding in the Holy Lands of Palestine and Israel. (Tuesday 16.00-18.00)
Robert Wertz
Paths to Peace Foundation, Arizona, USA
Description
The special session would demonstrate how virtual reality (VR) can be used to create a Meta University. The session participants will convene in a virtual classroom, receive instruction for an interactive peace based project and then realize the project in a real world setting. Participants that do not have access to VR headsets will be able to concurrently observe the session. The session will demonstrate the viability of VR to facilitate the participation of individuals located around the world that may not be able to travel due to cost, political situations or carbon footprint travel considerations. The session will include a video and testimonials from Palestinian peacebuilders that participated in a related pilot program in 2023. The video may be viewed through the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5DmnfwkpUA&list=PLiAKDww1drNfUkwSdufxyWV-qO_eAmMS9
Please note that this is an extension of a program entitled, Paths to Peace. The Paths to Peace program was presented at the 2018 ESJP Conference at the University of San Diego.
Special Session OB: Gender in our Lives (Tuesday 16.00-18.00)
Ayush Gupta (they/them)
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India.
Description
In this interactive online session, we will explore gender in our lives through discussions, games, media, and sketching. Through these activities, I want us to start building connections between our experiences and frameworks of power, to see gender as a system of power. I also hope to make the session fun, interactive, allowing for creative explorations and maybe even, some whimsical fantasizing. Please do try to do the pre-conference activity – it’s not mandatory, but it would help get us started.
Special session OC: Engineering Equity with Jade Lab (Thursday 17:00-18:00)
Sydney Turner, Maggie Salomonsky, Patrick Hancock, and Bethany Gordon Hoy
Jade Lab
Description
The Just Action for Design and Engineering Lab (or jade lab for short), a worker cooperative design consultancy, was founded by four engineering alumni from the University of Virginia. Leveraging our expertise across a broad spectrum of technical and social knowledge domains, we develop strategies alongside our clients that support them in challenging the technologies and systems that make up our built environment. By working at the intersection of design and social justice, jade lab aids clients in bridging the intersection between technical engineering rhythms and responsible social influence. The lab is committed to uplifting design as a practice of inclusive innovation, firmly rejecting the notion that progress can serve as a justification for perpetuating harm—a concept that has historically been, and still is, all too common in design practice. We are excited to share insights from our unconventional approach to design and strategic consulting with ESJP Conference participants. Our session will reflect upon our journey from creating a business plan to securing our first client, concluding with an overview of our approach to client work through an interactive mock design sprint. We also welcome attendees who have already integrated this mode of thinking into their practice to share any valuable insights they have gained along the way. We aim for this session to encourage participants to reflect on the norms within their academic or professional domain that may hinder socially just outcomes. With these norms in mind, attendees will workshop justice-centered goals they could pursue if they were held accountable for their impacts. Through this workshop, our goal is to demonstrate how, at jade lab, we co-design reparative structures that address multiple justice intersections and facilitate tangible, positive change. The workshop will be conducted virtually, utilizing a digital art board collage for interactive elements.
Online Contribution session: English (Thursday 16:00–17:00)
First Thrive, Then Lead: A trauma-informed anti-colonial approach to engineering leadership education.
Dimpho Radebe1 and Kai Zhuang2
- Troost ILead, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada
- Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Canada
Description
The study of human psychology explores the essential needs of autonomy, relatedness, and competence, emphasizing their role in personal well-being. Data on North American students, however, reveal high levels of stress, anxiety, and depression, suggesting a lack of thriving. Traditional engineering leadership education predominantly focuses on competence, often neglecting autonomy and relatedness. Our conceptual paper introduces a transformative approach to engineering leadership education, First Thrive, Then Lead which integrates these psychological needs. This holistic method addresses the harms of colonial legacies and incorporates non-European wisdom traditions and personal experiences, grounded in scientific theories. By integrating trauma-informed practices and anti-colonial methodologies, this approach aims to foster student well-being and encourage intentional leadership from a foundation of collective thriving. It envisions engineering leaders who are prepared to handle complexity, honour historical injustices, and drive positive social change.
Mentoring on fractured ground: A migrant junior faculty member’s perspective.
Sergio Guillén Grillo
Description
A collection of four spoken-word pieces, “A Mentor in a Lifeboat”, about the tensions faced as a temporary immigrant junior engineering faculty when arriving at an industrialized country university. Authorities and fellow faculty in these communities often lack awareness of the barriers to wellness and everyday survival that migrant faculty face. Institutional programs that serve international students and scholars often omit the needs of immigrant faculty. While immigrant faculty are privileged in many ways relative to other migrant populations, we face significant structural disadvantages relative to our non-immigrant faculty peers. We arrive in-country with no social security number, local landlord references, established primary healthcare provider, nor credit history in the country. Our dependents are coping with their adjustment to the new culture (or enduring a long-distance dynamic) and our immigration status does not allow our partners to seek legal employment (unless they obtain their own work visas).
As we navigate these challenges with gaps in our guidance and advocacy, we are tasked to mentor our students with their own personal and transitional life challenges. As international faculty, we are often sought to perform additional services supporting international students with their own challenges of cultural adaptation and contributing to initiatives that enhance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. These D.E.I. programs often fail to recognize immigrant faculty as a diverse constituency with a wide range of excluded or unrecognized needs. As recent and early-career arrivals, we are also often underrepresented in the governance and administrative bodies of the university.
The collection of poems maps my journey from coping with imposter as an international Ph.D. student, to teaching as a new professor while seeking to overcome toxic housing conditions.
Inspiring Radical Hope through Storycrafting.
Nadia Kellam1, Earl Lee1, Kristen Ferris2, Susannah Davis2, Katharine Getz3, and Vanessa Svihla2
- Arizona State University, United States
- The University of New Mexico, United States
- Pennsylvania State University, United States
Description
In our collaborative work together we are developing a community of transformation for faculty who are engaged in equity-focused institutional change work we are committed to valuing ways of knowing that are not traditionally prioritized in higher education. For example, in our engagement with our community we are engaging in speculative design, futurisms, remixing in design, and arts-based approaches. In two of our sessions with this newly formed GATHER community, we engaged in co-constructing a dark futures narrative and a prequel that builds on radical hope. In crafting a dark futures narrative, we engaged playfully in thinking about the worst possible future in our institutional change project and employed CHATgpt and Dall-E to help smooth our narrative and create a story arc. In the next session we revisited that narrative and created a prequel that helped us consider ways that our equity-focused work could help prevent that possible future. This series of activities helped us engage in a radical re-imagining of our work and our vision as higher education faculty and STEM educators. In this session, we will share the artifacts created in these sessions and inspire others to use dark future narratives to re-imagine the future of engineering education.
Online Contribution session: Spanish (Thursday 16:00–17:00)
Estrés por Aculturación en Estudiantes Latinoamericanos de Ingeniería en el Extranjero.
Fabiola Rosales Sanchez
Habitar la huerta. Construcción interactoral de conocimiento sobre el procesamiento de plantas en el marco de la tecnología social.
Ana Elizabeth de la Horra1, Judith Betsabé Grill1 and Anabela Fantilli2
- Laboratorio Popular, Argentina
- Facultad de Ciencias Médicas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; CONICET: Argentina
Description
En el esquema de la economía informal persiste la necesidad de contar con desarrollos contextualizados y co-construidos que mejoren las actividades productivas y generen condiciones de vida dignas. El artículo reflexiona sobre: ¿Cómo construir una tecnología que responda a necesidades e intereses territorializados? ¿Cuál es el papel de los profesionales universitarios en este escenario? ¿Cómo resignificar el conocimiento académico y el quehacer profesional para impulsar la co-construcción del conocimiento pos de desarrollos que busquen la transformación social?. Se analizaron proyectos realizados entre mujeres trabajadoras de huertas comunitarias y profesionales, docentes y estudiantes universitarios (química, biología y artes) e instituciones estatales. El trabajo desde una perspectiva epistémica participativa y constructivista, permitió la co-construcción de conocimiento para el desarrollo de una tecnología social: técnicas de aprovechamiento de plantas aromáticas e instrumentos de gestión. La articulación entre múltiples actores y la decisión de los profesionales de ejercer su profesión desde lógicas más democráticas, resultaron aspectos claves para resignificar el habitar de la huerta y expandir la territorialidad propia de los actores intervinientes.