2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Abstract: “Engineering Education in Times of War, Upheaval and Revolution”

In this paper we consider how the conditions of wartime, uprising, and other dramatic social episodes reveal possibilities for a more historically grounded and socio-politically engaged engineering-student identity. We do not see social crises as constituting exceptional moments, culturally, but rather as revealing nascent and often unsanctioned forms of civic and disciplinary identity among engineering students. To grasp the discursive and material features of Engineering education exposed during crises, we build on existing interdisciplinary literature examining the politicization of engineering education across transnational higher-education settings. This body of work has made evident how “value-free” characterizations of scientific and technical learning or practice poorly capture cultural, epistemic and ontological natures of Engineering in even the quietest political periods, let alone during social disturbance. We ask: How are engineering student identities constructed in relation to a discipline with robust connections to national objectives of industry and military, particularly in moments of upheaval and instability? How are ideas of national belonging and resistance formulated by engineering students and received by engineering institutions? We frame our inquiry through a comparison of student experiences at MIT and Sharif University in Iran during the 1970s, during which time students at the schools expressed a range of political commitments. Plans at MIT to train graduate students from Iran in support of that nation's nuclear program generated protest in both settings. By following the engineering student as social actor in times of war, upheaval or revolution we outline a less singular or determinate character for Engineering education than our studies usually indicate and suggest questions that may help us systematically explore that multiplicity in light of current political tensions.