Abstract
This book contributes to and enhances recent efforts to meaningfully integrate social justice into engineering education. The book’s two constituent elements—engineering and social justice—are very much about hope. Separately, the fields of engineering and social justice are about hope because those of us who enact, teach and/or benefit from them hope that their manifestations in the world, in the form of technologies or social policies, will bring some kind of social good and make the world a more compassionate, just place. Yet these two fields of practice and sources of hope have rarely come together, let alone become integrated. When they come together, it is often via clashing organizational, pedagogical, practical or technical manifestations, which often end in exacerbated social inequalities and injustices. So how might engineering educators, students and practitioners begin integrating these two fields of practice in the classroom, the lab, in fieldwork, in conferences, and other spaces of scholarly and pedagogical activity, in a way that results in more just technologies?
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I am in debt to philosopher Martha Nussbaum for reminding us that social justice practices, like other forms of human and social development, should be, after all, about the development of human capabilities (Nussbaum 2011).
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Lucena, J. (2013). Introduction. In: Lucena, J. (eds) Engineering Education for Social Justice. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6350-0_1
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