Engineering and Social Justice

Abstract

What do we mean when we say ‘engineering and social justice’? When initially conceived of as an area of scholarship and education, justice was considered by many, to be a strange bedfellow of engineering practice. In the last 15 years, this emerging field has grown and influenced the direction of much engineering education and research. However, as with any growth and development, the nuances of the initial conception are often lost in translation, as new groups, individuals and disciplines join the endeavour. This can be healthy, and critically important, to bring in necessary diversity and reach new depths. However, it is also possible for dominant discourses to appropriate the subtleties of new ideas and vulnerable minority views need to maintain their vision amidst the power of the majority ‘common sense’. This chapter takes a detailed look at engineering and social justice and its critical similarities to, and differences from, three related fields: engineering ethics, humanitarian engineering and corporate social responsibility. We have explored this through the concept of variation theory —whereby understanding comes through varying around critically important aspects of a concept. Ultimately, we see that in order to fulfil the promise of socially just engineering, we must sustain our ability to continually question our assumptions, about what we are doing, why we are doing it and, most importantly, for whom .

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.