2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering identity has long been influenced by the persistent presence of whiteness within the field, shaping perceptions, norms, and ideals (Tonso, 2007). Engineering, as a field and a profession, has been historically dominated by a predominantly white, male demographic. This dominance has not only perpetuated stereotypes and biases within the field but has also influenced the way engineering identities are constructed and perceived. Social media platforms, as a contemporary medium for discourse, provide a rich source of data for understanding how these constructions manifest in the digital age. Social media posts facilitate the messaging of stereotypes (Dobson & Knezevic, 2018) including gender stereotypes as well as shaping and regulating identities (Dracket et al., 2018).This study seeks to examine the implications of this phenomenon by employing a multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & Bezemer, 2023; Kress, 2010) of social media posts, particularly memes. Memes are “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual Internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process” (Shifman, 2013, p. 367). Our goal is to illuminate how the construction of engineering identity, often unintentionally, perpetuates an exclusionary framework that is difficult for individuals from diverse backgrounds to access, while simultaneously fostering a utopian idealization of engineering identities that are often harmful and unattainable.

Our analysis delves into memes to uncover how engineering identities are portrayed, celebrated, and even idealized. We selected the top 100 memes from an advanced search in Google Chrome using the terms “engineering memes” to retrieve the data for analysis for this paper. Through these portrayals in social media, we examined how the persistence of whiteness in engineering is represented in these multimodal artifacts, while simultaneously uncovering the forms in which racialization is often constructed in these discourses. To this end, we employ a racionlinguistic lens (Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2019) to analyze how these representations encompass not just gender but also linguistic and racial stereotyping depicting the “other” (i.e., non-white heterosexual, standard English speaker male) as powerless, inadequate, or deficient. By employing a multimodal approach for the analysis and a raciolinguistic lens, we consider not only the textual content of posts but also the visual and interactive elements, acknowledging that identity construction in the digital age is a multifaceted endeavor.

Our research reveals the possible consequences of these identity constructions. By idealizing a specific, often homogenous, engineering identity, we risk excluding individuals from diverse backgrounds who do not fit this mold. This exclusionary conceptualization of engineering can deter minoritized groups from pursuing careers in engineering and hinder the advancement of diversity within the field. Ultimately, our study seeks to shed light on the complexities of constructing an engineering identity in a world where whiteness has long been the norm and racialization is often ignored. By unpacking the ways in which engineering identities are limited by this persistence of whiteness, we aim to encourage a more inclusive and diverse understanding of what it means to be or become an engineer.

References

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Dobson, K., & Knezevic, I. (2018). “Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That!”: Framing and Stereotyping in Legacy and Social Media. Canadian Journal of Communication, 43(3), 381–397. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2018v43n3a3378
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Flores, N. L., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149-171.
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Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press.
Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18(3), 362–377. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013
Tonso, K. L. (2007). On the outskirts of engineering: Learning identity, gender, and power via engineering practice. Sense Publishers.