Introduction to the New Editor-in-Chief

As our outgoing editor-in-chief Cyrus Mody wrote in his editorial for Volume 13, Issue 3 of Engineering Studies, we stand on each other's shoulders.¹ As I move into the editor-in-chief position, I find this observation to be both apt and encouraging. I join the rest of our intellectual community in thanking Cyrus for his leadership of the journal, especially in carrying on its day-to-day work while many of us were sick and caring for our others during the most trying periods of the pandemic. I am personally grateful for his generosity in helping with the transition, including the burst of editorial work he completed over the holidays so I could start on solid ground. I also thank Gary Downey, not just for his original vision in laying down the foundations for both the journal and the International Network for Engineering Studies (https://inesweb.org/), but for his continued energy in imagining both what engineering – and engineering studies – can be. Learning the ropes has made clear how crucial Kacey Beddoes, our managing editor, has been for the journal's success. I am also deeply appreciative of the care that our other associate and advisory editors, our reviewers, the board, and our authors put into their contributions to the journal. I am also grateful that Brent Jesiek stepped into the INES chair role I vacated to accept the editorial position, paving the way for Caitlin Wylie, our current vice chair, to rotate into that position in 2024.

An unexpected path to engineering studies

While our journal is intentionally collaborative and welcome to unconventional contributions, it is also true that the sensibilities and vision of the editor-in-chief shape the form the journal takes. The observations that the new editors of Science, Technology, and Human Values make about the journal's relationship to STS hold true for this journal and our field of engineering studies: ‘Each editorial decision does something, however small, to the assemblage of texts, practices, orientations, and ideas that is STS: it admits a new question, concept, or empirical detail that adds to or modifies the existing corpus’.²

It is in that spirit that I share a bit about myself, how I came to engineering studies, and preliminary ideas for the journal's future. As I have written about elsewhere, I came to engineering studies when grappling with my new position as an anthropologist at the Colorado School of Mines, a public engineering and applied science university with a unique institutional mission related to earth, energy, and environment.³ I had attended Macalester College as an undergraduate, where I majored in anthropology, international studies, and Latin American studies and took minors in women's studies and Spanish. (The planning that went into putting together that course progression continues to provide some empathy with my current engineering students, who are living through their flowcharts.) Looking back, I see how moving among those fields set the stage for me to draw from multiple disciplines in my own research and to collaborate with scholars from disciplinary backgrounds different from my own. After graduation, I immediately started the PhD program in anthropology at the University of Michigan. I put on hold my plans of returning to my initial research in Cuba and instead completed a dissertation on gender, labor, and kinship in the Wyoming coal town where I grew up.⁴ The engineers and their knowledge hovered in the background of my research, often serving as a foil for the miners and their knowledge, though I did not center engineers in my analysis.

When I began a tenure-track job at Mines in 2012, going to campus felt like doing fieldwork. The institution's historical ties to the mining and oil and gas industries felt familiar, but being surrounded by engineering students, faculty, and administrators did not. I am grateful to Juan Lucena, who played an early leadership role in the creation of both INES and the journal, for introducing me to engineering studies as a way of making sense of our students, the institution, and my role within it. It did not take long to realize how fortunate I was to also share institutional space and conversation with Carl Mitcham, the distinguished and kind philosopher of engineering. They helped me see Mines as an intellectual question, and Juan in particular showed me how academic life can be a form of what Gary Downey has called critical participation and making-and-doing.⁵ A real strength of our journal is our inclusion of critical participation articles that help us see how engineering studies can live out in the world. Thanks primarily to Juan's network building, Mines is now home to a core group of engineering studies scholars, which also includes Marie Stettler Kleine, Jon Leydens, Dean Nieusma, Beth Reddy, and our colleagues in the Department of Engineering, Design, and Society.

When I started providing lectures for our first year engineering students at Mines, I looked out across the auditorium and realized that many of them would become the bosses, mine managers, and CEOs who had frustrated – sometimes humorously, and sometimes not – people like my family, coworkers, and friends, to say nothing of activists who hold industry to account. Given our students’ limited opportunities to take courses in the liberal arts, it seemed imperative that I find ways to help them think about the inherent politics of their work as engineers, the history of how their fields had defined their accountabilities to the public, and potential opportunities to use their training to make their industries more responsive a wider array of ‘stakeholders’ and pressing concerns. That urgency helped inspire my second book, an ethnography of engineers practicing in the mining and oil and gas industries.⁶ My ethnographic research was complemented by critical participation in engineering education, as I helped engineering faculty integrate findings from my research into their teaching and fed the questions raised by students into my ethnographic inquiry. At the same time, my deep appreciation for the knowledge held by people who work with their hands for a living also made me curious about relationships between engineering and the skilled trades, sparking an evolving, collaborative research project on low-income and first-generation engineering students.⁷ All of these interests informed the decade I spent collaboratively building academic infrastructure in the form of our Humanitarian Engineering program, which trains engineering and applied science students to approach their work from a sociotechnical perspective in order to work with the people they seek to serve to enhance social justice and sustainability.

So, why take on the editorship of Engineering Studies? And why do so, now? In part, I am grateful for our intellectual community and want to see it continue thriving. The journal and scholars affiliated with INES have supported my own professional development. The first engineering-centric article I wrote was published in this journal, and I still remember the close reading Gary gave it. His insightful and detailed feedback made me a better writer and reminded me of the generous mentorship I had received from my PhD advisor, Stuart Kirsch. I am happy to take on that role now and ensure that the journal continues to be known for its developmental editing. I appreciate all of the care and work that goes into keeping our community going, from completing manuscript reviews to evaluating promotion and tenure packages, and see this role as one well suited to my own strengths. This leads me to my other primary motivation. I adore writing. And even more than writing, I adore revising. I experience existential satisfaction taking my own or others’ writing and wrestling through how to make the argument theoretically crisp. How to arrange the materials to present a compelling case. How to prioritize literature reviews. How to use language that helps the data sing. I am excited for the opportunity to spend more of time doing this kind of work. The threads of interdisciplinarity, mentorship, publishing, and community building that weave through my own unexpected academic trajectory resonate strongly with Engineering Studies, as does my own scholarly interest in both practicing engineers and engineers-in-training.

Opportunities for the journal

As the new editors of Science, Technology, and Human Values also write, journals ought to both define and extend a field. We should aim for both coherence and friction. I aim for the journal to continue serving as a rich intellectual meeting ground for our wonderfully diverse scholarly community at the same time as we reach out to welcome new perspectives.

I welcome broad participation in envisioning the future of the journal, especially as it intersects with our ongoing INES visioning. The academic publishing world is undergoing major transitions to which we will need to collectively respond, all the while ensuring that the journal retains its distinctive mission and inclusive community. I encourage you to look out for meet-ups at our key professional association conferences, as well as a potential hybrid INES event hopefully to be held in conjunction with IEEE Ethics 2023 at Purdue. I have been energized by in-person get togethers at the annual meetings in STS, anthropology, and history, and am eager to seek out and support the amplification of engineering studies work in other highly relevant disciplines, such as geography and policy.

I see exciting opportunities for us to build on our strengths and grow into new areas of research. I see more and more of my fellow anthropologists working with and studying engineers as they tackle questions of infrastructure and climate.⁸ Not explicitly linking this research with engineering studies scholarship is a missed opportunity, and my hunch is this trend is not limited to anthropology. This dilemma has prompted me to reflect on what constitutes ‘engineering studies’ beyond simply studies of engineers and engineering, and also makes me wish I could recommend a few review articles to introduce engineering-curious scholars to our field. In that spirit, I would like to commission a few retrospective articles that will look back and synthesize the knowledge we have created related to particular themes or questions. We certainly have plenty to draw from: this is the fifteenth year of the journal and exciting books are being published by The MIT Press, including the engineering studies series co-edited by Gary Downey and Matt Wisnioski.⁹ Cyrus recently laid out many of the current barriers to publishing book reviews, and I would like to find creative ways to address these, given the crucial work that reviews do for helping knowledge travel.¹⁰

A key strength of the journal and our network is its international character, and I will make a concerted effort with the associate editors to solicit articles from parts of the world that are less well represented in our scholarship. Thematically, a significant strength of the journal has been our sustained attention to gender, which I hope will continue to thrive and include more attention to gender beyond the binary. Given the role that engineers play in designing and building infrastructures, artifacts, and processes, we are also well positioned to growing scholarship on ‘futuring,’ including by contributing to critical studies of innovation and its ties to neoliberal forms of entrepreneurship.¹¹ That scholarship could inform how many of us think about and respond to our being enrolled in institutional projects that promote innovation as an ethical good. I also see a significant opportunity for our field to contribute to scholarship on energy, given the centrality of the energy transition in public and academic debate and the vital role of engineers in designing, building, and operating new energy infrastructures and in decommissioning coal, oil and other facilities. While renewable energy and electrification are often associated with a ‘green halo,’ they are nonetheless major industrial projects that will redistribute harms and benefits, risks and opportunities.¹² For example, how do engineers account for environmental and social justice as they design energy infrastructure, and how is this constrained by the institutional context of their work? How do other claims of expertise, such as from citizen scientists, articulate with or challenge their work? The energy transition will need to be permitted. While the US federal government has allocated billions of dollars to clean energy infrastructure, for example, each project must be permitted at a local level, often in the midst of political polarization. In addition to serving as mediators and representatives for project proponents, engineers play central roles in the behind-the-scenes practice of environmental impact assessment and other audits that are shape public perceptions of risks and benefits.

Engineering Studies is unique in publishing research about practicing engineers as well as engineers-in-training. We welcome contributions from engineering educators that investigate the cultural, historical, political, and other dimensions of engineering education in practice. This scholarship almost exclusively focuses on curricula and students, making me particularly keen to publish more research about engineering educators themselves. For example, Mary Blair-Loy and Erin Cech's recent book Misconceiving Merit vividly shows how academic scientists and engineers’ notions of merit privilege white and Asian heterosexual men over equally productive women and academics from under-represented backgrounds.¹³ While there is significant scholarship investigating the tenuous integration of the social sciences and humanities inside of engineering curricula, we know much less about the actual the experiences of social science and humanities professors themselves. What can we learn from our experiences of being a ‘thorn in the side’ of the institutions we both belong to and critique?¹⁴

Finally, the pandemic and its continued reverberations have centered notions of care in our scholarship and teaching. How do engineers practice care, and how are their opportunities to care shaped by the institutional context of their work?¹⁵ What relations of care undergird our intellectual communities?¹⁶ What other forms of care ought we keep in mind as we are envisioning other kinds of futures for ourselves, our environments, and our more-than-human others?¹⁷

Issue 15.1

We enact care through our processes of constructive review and developmental editing, hallmarks of the journal. The three articles that comprise this issue were shepherded by Cyrus Mody to help ensure that this issue came out on schedule. They reflect many of the strengths and new opportunities I highlighted above. The two critical participation articles focus on building inclusive and transformative academic infrastructures. In ‘Negotiating Boundaries,’ Coleen Carrigan and colleagues on an NSF ADVANCE grant trace how a diverse group of women academics negotiated distinct identities and disciplinary boundaries in order to support early career female faculty. Carrigan used critical ethnography in the vein of Participatory Action Research to study the leadership group meetings, both online and in person. Their research revealed three concrete strategies the group practiced to ‘build group coherence across multiple dimensions of difference’ that can be readily picked up by other leaders and even instructors. The portion on storytelling as a way to heal, problem solve, and ‘act as allies and advocate for perspectives that were absent’ from their team is particularly creative. The article provides a nuanced reflection on intersectional and interdisciplinary collaboration, concluding that ‘interdisciplinary collaborations between social scientists and engineers are not just instruments of reform in engineering but, rather, a science in and of themselves.’

The insight that collaboration is itself a science as well as an instrument for reform also animates the second article, ‘Teaching Students to Collaborate with Communities,’ by Hirsch and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The authors also reflect on academic collaborations across difference, though with a focus on teaching undergraduates how to work with diverse stakeholders through their Serve-Learn-Sustain program. They insightfully note that encouraging students to view themselves as collaborators and co-learners with community members who carry their own expertise challenges the dominant identification of engineers as technical problem solvers. They provide compelling assessment evidence for positive impacts on the institution and students, finding that they ‘can and do respond profoundly to the opportunities to stretch themselves, their thinking, and their aspirations, especially when it comes to putting their skills into action to create a more sustainable and just society.’ At the same time, they note the difficulties of assessing the impact of student programming and projects for the communities themselves – a perpetual challenge for the rapidly growing arena of ‘engineering for good’ programs.¹⁸

Finally, Bård Torvetjønn Haugland and colleagues offer a different kind of working-across-difference in ‘Framing Intelligent Transport Systems in the Arctic.’ Their ethnography traces how transport engineers tirelessly attempt to manage how humans and other animals interact with a road in the arctic region of Norway, believing that technologies such as ‘repurposed parking sensors and smart signs or I2V communications and GPS-tracked reindeer … would help contain an ever-increasing number of actors in their framing of the road.’ Each time they attempted to contain overflows – such as the reindeer traversing the road, the freight trucks carrying frozen salmon, or the tourists using the road for stargazing – they created new ones, leading the authors to conclude that ‘rather than solving problems, frame expansions merely change what problems are present, for better or worse.’ Their nuanced attention to (non-human) animals opens up new connections between engineering studies and the growing field of animal studies. While engineers and engineering studies scholars are accustomed to considering the ‘local perspectives’ of projects, those perspectives rarely includes animals (perhaps outside of environmental impact assessments that provide baseline estimates and predict impacts on particular species). Their work shows that that animals shape the ‘construction of sociotechnical futures,’ which should invite scholars in our community to more carefully consider how more-than-human ‘nature’ factors into our theories of the sociotechnical ‘nature’ of engineering.

These contributions speak to the breadth and creativity of engineering studies. We have much to contribute to urgent contemporary dilemmas, and I am thrilled to work with our editorial team and authors to share our scholarship and practice with our readers.

Notes

1 Mody, “Standing on Each Other's Shoulders.”

2 Neale et al., “What Is an STS Contribution Now?”

3 Smith, Extracting Accountability.

4 Smith, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender.

5 Downey, “What Is Engineering Studies for?”; Downey and Zuiderent-Jerak, Making & Doing.

6 Smith, Extracting Accountability.

7 See, for example, Verdín, Smith, and Lucena, “Recognizing the Funds of Knowledge”; Smith and Lucena, “Invisible Innovators.”

8 For example, see Barnes, Cultivating the Nile; Chahim, “Governing Beyond Capacity”; Harvey and Knox, Roads; Vaughn, Engineering Vulnerability.

9 See, for example, Bix, Girls Coming to Tech!; Chatzis, Forecasting Travel in Urban America; Mody, The Squares; Reddy, Alerta!; Wisnioski, Engineers for Change; Wisnioski, Hintz, and Kleine, Does America Need More Innovators?

10 Mody, “It's the End, but the Moment Has Been Prepared for.”

11 Conley and York, “Public Engagement in Contested Political Contexts”; Wisnioski, Hintz, and Kleine, Does America Need More Innovators?

12 Mulvaney, Solar Power.

13 Blair-Loy and Cech, Misconceiving Merit.

14 Smith, Extracting Accountability; Turkle, Empathy Diaries.

15 Reddy, “Crying ‘Crying Wolf.’”

16 Kleine et al., “The Multiplicity of Care in Engineering Education and Program Building,” 2022.

17 Lyons, Vital Decomposition; Puig de La Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience”; Segal and Jahn, Design & Solidarity.

18 Kleine and Lucena, “The World of ‘Engineering for Good’”; Laporte, Kim, and Smith, “Engineering to Help Communities or Students’ Development?”