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Session Description

As many around us today face a sudden and unlawful loss of employment, termination of research projects, and deportation of students and neighbors at the hands of the federal government, efforts to makes sense of these events invoke terms such as “catastrophic” and “apocalyptic.” The singular figure insistently claiming credit for these developments certainly wants us to see them that way: As signs purely of his mighty power, wrought with his pen, since January 6, 2025. In an immediate sense, they are his doing. Of what use, then, with these threats and harms playing out in real time around us, is history in 2025? Why engage with historical accounts instead of joining protests, stocking food banks, building legal defense funds or registering voters?

Drawing on my forthcoming book, All Good People: Difference, Diversity and the Invention of Opportunity, I suggest here that the lens of history can help us comprehend that this threat is not novel. As colleagues of color, and queer and disabled folks have made clear: 2025 is not a surprise. A historical accounting can help those of us reeling from shock see the racial, gender, and sexuality- and ability-related authority that has largely defined “fairness” and “democracy” in US culture and in crucial ways, led to this moment. The wider aperture of critical historical reflection shows us that the institutions through which white, male, gender-conforming and abled security subsists in the United States have not been much disrupted by reforms of earlier eras. Integration, Affirmative Action legislation, and lately, “DEI” have brought to some individuals vital avenues of mobility but have also left foundational social structures intact. My specific suggestion within our field is that we reject the familiar understanding of “opportunity” and “access” in Engineering Education as deserved rewards for meritorious individuals, impeded in the 21st century merely by retrograde biases. We can instead see these possibilities as historically, constituting a relationship between those with and without power. It is a relationship by which American higher education and capital have together differentiated people …long emplacing some in positions of safety, autonomy and open futures, and others as deserving less secure, less rewarding lives. Such a relational interrogation of inclusion shows that 2025 has brought catastrophe, yes, but it has also brought continuity.

For those interested in: Advocacy and Policy and Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology

Speaker

1. Prof. Amy Slaton

   Drexel University

   Amy E. Slaton is a professor emerita in the Department of History at Drexel University. She holds a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Slaton’s research has centered on the social character of technoscientific expertise and work. She has written on the history of building technologies and materials testing, with a focus on who gets credit when things go well, and who gets blamed when structures and materials fail. Her book, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), integrated the histories of materials testing, construction labor, building codes and standards, and aesthetic change surrounding the introduction of commercial reinforced concrete in the United States. Further work on materiality, labor, and historical formulations of human difference can be found in her edited volume, New Materials: Towards a History of Consistency (Lever Press, 2020).

   Slaton is also interested in recent understandings of technical aptitude in engineering education under capitalism more generally, with particular emphasis on the role of race, gender, disability and queer identifications. She is the author of Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Harvard University Press, 2010). Her current book project is All Good People: Diversity, Difference and The Invention of Opportunity, under contract with MIT Press. Slaton produces the website, amyeslaton.com centered on equity in technical education and workforce issues, and her commentaries have appeared in Inside Higher Ed, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other outlets. She is co-editor, with Tiago Saraiva, of the journal, History+Technology.