2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this paper we use the framing of “engineering as conflict” to unpack tensions, historical context, and practice of a liberal engineering education. Engineers have long positioned themselves as “problem-solvers” uniquely situated to use technical knowledge to propose solutions to complex problems. Recent work has identified the need to better integrate nontechnical knowledge into engineering education as a way of reflecting the complex social and political landscapes that structure engineering practice (Reddy, Kleine, Parsons, & Nieusma 2023). Here we explore using a framework for “engineering as conflict” as a compelling practice of sociotechnical integration at the undergraduate level. Here, conflict refers to the practice or process of disagreement, difference of opinion or tensions. From the perspective of science and technology studies, conflict can be understood as central to understanding the consequences of engineering decision-making in contemporary society. Practically, conflict, in the form of “normal accidents” or instances of environmental injustice, provides occasions for record-keeping, for legal action, and for media attention (Perrow 1984). Historically, in the US context, conflict motivated and accelerated research and development in engineering (Lucena 2005). Analytically, conflict as a structure offers an opportunity to clarify differences in opinion and experience from the perspectives of engineers, political officials, corporate representatives, and community members. From the perspective of engineering design, conflict offers an alternate space for reimagining engineering education as one informed by tensions (Cheville and Heywood, 2016) and inherent to the “wicked” or sociotechnical pursuit of engineering design (Coyne, 2005; Norman & Stapper, 2015). We are writing from our positions as founding faculty members of an engineering department in a liberal arts institution coming from scholarly traditions in science and technology studies and engineering/engineering design education. In this paper, we hope to conceptualize “engineering as conflict” as a framing for engineering liberal education and share examples from our curricular and program development work.