Abstract
In this chapter, I briefly trace the history of engineers’ involvement in development, from national to international to sustainable development, and highlight when and how “sustainability” and “community participation” became important dimensions in this history. Yet throughout this trajectory, a number of engineering mindsets have come to shape engineering practice and education and contributed to making social justice invisible to most engineers, restricting their ability to contribute to a fair distribution of rights, opportunities, and resources when working in community development and humanitarian endeavors. This chapter outlines these mindsets and proposes a number of possibilities to overcome them so engineers can effectively address social justice within their practices and projects in community development.
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Notes
- 1.
There are a number of very engaging case studies of engineers who have challenged the ideology of development. For example, Fred Cuny questioned models of development (in the form of humanitarian aid), reconceptualizing “victims” of humanitarian crises into “partners” who needed to be employed in the solution of their own problems (Cuny 1983). Another example is that of the Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA) engineers who questioned international development as an instrument of Cold War politics in the 1960s and implemented an alternative model to provide technical solutions to the developing world (Wisnioski 2012).
- 2.
A search for definitions of “sustainable development” within engineering societies will reveal a striking acceptance of Brundtland’s definition without much consideration of what it means for engineering education and practice.
- 3.
For comprehensive analyses and critiques of participatory methods, see Cooke and Kothari (2001).
- 4.
See Lucena et al. (2010, Chap. 4) for the case study “The Stranger’s Eyes” as an example of how this tyranny was enacted in a development project to install mills for grinding grain in various villages in Mali.
- 5.
See Mosse (2001) for a detailed analysis of how this happened in a participatory farming systems development project in India.
- 6.
For example, engineers working with Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) build pedestrian bridges with communities that allow its members to buy and sell produce in places they could not before (local economic diversity), attend community meetings and reach voting polling places (local political control), reduce the use of fossil fuels and (re)use local materials to construct the bridges.
- 7.
- 8.
Perhaps with the few exceptions of little manual work that happens in design projects and this manual work is often given to the machinist on campus. There is very little of the grade, if any, at stake for manual work.
- 9.
Note that these generalizations are drawn mainly from the history and organization of US engineering education and practice. It could be interesting to see if these apply in other national contexts, particularly in those who have emulated US educational and professional practices vs. those which are very different from the US. Also I am aware of the important exceptions from which much can be learned, e.g., US Progressive engineers in early nineteenth century, VITA, Fred Cuny, Mexican engineers of the Revolution, and present-day organizations like EWB-Australia and ISF-Colombia.
- 10.
Matt Wisnioski also documents other ways in which engineers have challenged the dominance of corporate and military organizations, for example, by creating Spark, an underground journal where they questioned and critiqued their corporate employers profit motives during Cold war weapon development.
- 11.
Brian Martin’s The whistleblower’s handbook: how to be an effective resister provides an excellent account of the mistakes, consequences and strategies that engineers face when speaking out against wrongdoing in a corporate setting. Also see Martin and Rifkin (2004).
- 12.
Other exemplars include Elena Rojas, a civil engineer who left a career in public works engineering to work with an NGO to develop community-based solutions for water supply and sanitation (Lucena et al. 2010). See also the story of William LeMessurier, who served as design and construction consultant on the innovative Citicorp headquarters tower, at onlineethics.org
- 13.
Students calculate the number of problems that they have to solve throughout their 4–5 years of engineering studies. Depending on the discipline and assumptions made during the calculations, my students have found that they solve anywhere between 1,500 and 3,000 problems using EPS.
- 14.
I found inspiration to appropriate EPS in the work of my colleagues in the Engineering, Social Justice and Peace (ESJP) Network such as Katy Haralampides who teaches Statistics to engineers at University of New Brunswick and Donna Riley who wrote a companion book for Thermodynamics (Riley 2011).
- 15.
For example, EWB students in my school participate in the actual design and building of Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) for communities in the global south. I often challenge them to write engineering problems where they have to calculate stresses and loads on different parts of the bridge while considering how these bridges might contribute to local economic diversity, political self-determination, and social justice. Through faculty workshops I can (hopefully) establish collaborations with Statics faculty who can incorporate these problems into their courses.
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Lucena, J. (2015). Bridging Sustainable Community Development and Social Justice. In: Christensen, S., Didier, C., Jamison, A., Meganck, M., Mitcham, C., Newberry, B. (eds) International Perspectives on Engineering Education. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16169-3_11
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