2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Students enter Humanitarian Engineering (HE) Graduate programs to address infrastructure service disparities in low-income and marginalized communities. Research has found that HE students and the larger HE field want to address the systemic causes of these disparities. However, there is a shortage of scholarship illustrating students' capacity to do so. Further, the limited scholarship on HE students and systemic change focus on the barriers and failures of students to do so. This study analyzes humanitarian engineering students' aspirations and actions for global infrastructure service improvement. We use the Transformational Resistance Framework (TRF) to characterize moments of motivation, negotiation, struggle, and advocacy to address structural oppression. In doing so, this study explores the potential for Humanitarian Engineering students to act as agents of change in transforming unjust systems of oppression. Specifically, this preliminary study found moments of students demonstrating a strong motivation for social justice, critiquing systems of oppression, and, at times, demonstrating both of these characteristics simultaneously.