2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This theory full paper advances the development of a discursive theory of caste-blindness in engineering education, using discourse analysis as a generative tool.

In contemporary professional or “polite” settings, overtly discriminatory language is often replaced by talk that appears neutral, inclusive, or merit-based yet reflects underlying hierarchies. For instance, one might claim that “caste doesn’t exist in the U.S.” despite growing evidence of caste-based bias in education and employment. Such statements demonstrate how language, while appearing progressive, can obscure the systemic realities of inequity. Engineering education is particularly susceptible to these dynamics because its disciplinary culture prizes objectivity, neutrality, and meritocracy, values that can unintentionally mask the social systems that shape opportunity and exclusion. Drawing on Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism, we extend the concept of blindness to caste to examine how privilege operates across transnational contexts. In addition, guided by Gee’s socio-cultural discourse analysis and Willig’s Foucauldian approach we demonstrate how everyday language constructs and reproduces caste as a system of privilege/power.

We define caste-blindness as a cultural practice which denies, minimizes, or individualizes caste inequity. We purport that caste-blindness operates as a set of discursive strategies, which we define as socially shared and culturally reinforced patterns of reasoning and ways of speaking that make caste inequity appear irrelevant, individual, or already resolved. Within engineering education, these reinforced forms of reasoning draw from the disciplinary logics of meritocracy, neutrality, and objectivity. We draw on illustrative discourse examples from Author 1’s doctoral dissertation, which includes interviews with South Asian graduate students in U.S. engineering programs. Through these examples, we identified seven key strategies of caste-blindness including, equating success with individual merit and effort, affirmative policies lower quality, and individualizing caste as a mindset while invoking gradual progress narratives that suggest inequity will fade with time. For instance, claiming that “affirmative policies lower quality” invokes engineering’s ideals of objectivity and fairness, while distancing speakers from systemic privilege/oppression. This reveals how caste-blindness is not simply a lack of awareness but an active cultural process of meaning-making, where politeness, professionalism, and meritocratic reasoning operate as forms of evasive discourse. By connecting participants’ everyday talk to larger disciplinary ideologies, we demonstrate how engineering’s cultural emphasis on neutrality and merit enables the persistence of inequity under the guise of professionalism.

This paper demonstrates how discourse analysis supports the development of discursive theory- theories that explain how systems of power and privilege are enacted and normalized through everyday language. This approach develops interpretive theory that connects micro-level talk to macro-level social structures. The theoretical product of this work is a discursive theory of caste-blindness, a framework that explains how language sustains inequity by rendering caste privilege invisible. This framework provides researchers and educators with analytic tools to recognize and interrogate the subtle discursive mechanisms that sustain blindness in contexts where neutrality, professionalism, and merit are celebrated. More broadly, the paper demonstrates that critical qualitative methods can produce situated relational theories of equity and power, offering transferable ways to examine similar blindness phenomena, such as race-, or class-evasion, across engineering education.