2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper provides a preliminary exploration of literature on engineering research culture and engineering research paradigms, with a focus on academic engineering research spaces. I define research as systematic investigation undertaken to establish knowledge claims, and culture as the shared values and beliefs that undergird the social contexts in which research takes place. Engineers occupy a critical role in broadening an understanding of the built, sociotechnical world while developing, designing, and constructing systems that are rooted in dominant society and dominant societal values. While engineering research shares many epistemic and methodological characteristics with traditional scientific fields, engineering research differs from pure, scientific research by applying scientific solutions for global, economic, environmental, and societal needs. These values are made salient in engineering research, as they both limit and invoke the work the community is motivated to research, as well as what work is valued, promoted, and funded. As this paper is a work in progress, I hope to receive and incorporate feedback in this ongoing work. While engineering research is a broad field full of many unique disciplines, I believe that this work can identify unifying cultural characteristics that exist across the field of engineering as a whole and provide better insight into the engineering research enterprise. I would like to explicitly note that this paper does not report on preliminary findings from the first stages of a scoping literature review, but it is a narrative literature review to lay a foundation for further exploration. The themes discussed in this paper include the exclusionary practices, research paradigms, and funding practices present in engineering research.