2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

While there has been significant attention toward exploring the experiences of historically minoritized students in engineering, such as Black, Latinx, indigenous, and other students of color, relatively little research has been devoted to Asians and Asian-Americans in engineering. Asian and Asian-American engineers comprise the majority of non-White engineers, representing 12.2% of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees earned and over one-third of tenured or tenure-track engineering faculty in the United States in 2018 (NCSES, 2018; ASEE, 2018). As the largest non-White group, they have played a unique racialized role in engineering, at once being cast as the “model minority” yet often overlooked as a minoritized group or viewed as a “perpetual foreigner” within White-dominated engineering spaces. In addition, legacies of Asian and Asian-American racialization, defined as the social, political, historical, and cultural processes that produce racial categories and attach meaning and value to those categories, manifest in complex, nuanced ways in engineering contexts (Iftikar & Museus, 2018; Omi & Winant, 1986). In this theory paper, we briefly survey the extant literature of Asian and Asian-American experiences in engineering and STEM education and identify areas for furthering structural critique in engineering education through Asian Critical Theory (AsianCrit). AsianCrit can be used to unpack the unique systemic structural forces and narratives that position Asian and Asian-Americans within a racialized engineering culture and how those forces continually (re)make their racialization and minoritization in engineering education. We conclude with how AsianCrit may highlight the unique challenges that Asian and Asian-American students encounter and resist as they navigate engineering education as well as provide pathways toward intersectional critique, social justice, liberatory policy and praxis, and solidarity with other minoritized groups in engineering.