Engineering education has long positioned itself as a neutral institution, a technical enterprise untouched by systems of power. Those within the field of engineering education have spent decades trying to fix its inequities without examining what produced them—by recruiting more broadly, diversifying faces, and expanding access to a system whose foundations have gone largely unquestioned. This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of imagination — and honestly about what engineering education is, who it serves, and what it was built to do. Good intentions have never been the problem. They have also never been enough.

This talk draws on Dr. Stephanie Masta's years of research to ask harder questions than good intentions alone can answer. Questions like: Can research conducted inside colonial institutions ever be ethical? Why do scholars within engineering education continue to invoke the language of decolonization while leaving intact the systems of power that word was meant to dismantle? What do we owe the people we study, the communities we claim to serve, and each other? And what does it mean to embody values through research rather than merely profess them?

Dr. Masta will ask you to sit with the discomfort of your own complicity — to look closely at what your research is actually doing in the world, who benefits from the knowledge you produce, who owns it, who funded it, and what land your institution is sitting on. She will ask you to consider the difference between research that serves communities and research that extracts from them, and how good intentions can make that distinction nearly impossible to see clearly.

Good intentions are not the enemy. But they have a way of becoming a stopping point — a place where we rest, satisfied that we mean well, while the structures we work inside continue doing what they were built to do. This talk asks what it looks like to move past meaning well. The goal is not guilt. The goal is clarity — about what we are doing, and what we owe.

• Dr. Avneet Hira