Abstract
Engineers will incorporate considerations of social justice issues into their work only to the extent that they see such issues as relevant to the practice of their profession. This chapter argues that two prominent ideologies within the culture of engineering—depoliticization and meritocracy—frame social justice issues in such a way that they seem irrelevant to engineering practice. Depoliticization is the belief that engineering is a “technical” space where “social” or “political” issues such as inequality are tangential to engineers’ work. The meritocratic ideology—the belief that inequalities are the result of a properly-functioning social system that rewards the most talented and hard-working—legitimates social injustices and undermines the motivation to rectify such inequalities. These ideologies are built into engineering culture and are deeply embedded in the professional socialization of engineering students. I argue that it is not enough for engineering educators to introduce social justice topics into the classroom; they must also directly confront ideologies of meritocracy and depoliticization. In other words, cultural space must be made before students, faculty and practitioners can begin to think deeply about the role of their profession in the promotion of social justice.
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Notes
- 1.
Schneider and Munakata Marr (Chap. 8, this volume) offer a useful “flexible” definition of working toward social justice as an “attempt to redress the unequal distribution of goods, rights, or opportunities, or to challenge policies or practices that exacerbate inequalities among groups of people” (p. 19).
- 2.
Engineering cultures differ by national context, variation that is partly contingent on the origin of engineering as a profession in each country (Downey and Lucena 2004).
- 3.
It is also possible that students who enter college believing in the meritocratic ideology are more likely to select into some majors (i.e. science and engineering) than others. This consideration is beyond the scope of this chapter, however.
- 4.
In the 1920s, for example, Robert Moses and his engineers intentionally designed hundreds of New York City bridges too low for city busses (which were typically used by poor and African-American New Yorkers) to pass underneath. This effectively prevented these groups from accessing the Long Island beaches, maintaining the beaches as white, middle-class spaces (Winner 1980).
- 5.
This is in contrast other professions such as law, where a certain level of pro-bono work is encouraged or expected.
- 6.
The National Coalition for the Homeless provides easily-accessible fact sheets on the prevalence and causes of homelessness in the United States (www.nationalhomeless.org)
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Cech, E.A. (2013). The (Mis)Framing of Social Justice: Why Ideologies of Depoliticization and Meritocracy Hinder Engineers’ Ability to Think About Social Injustices. In: Lucena, J. (eds) Engineering Education for Social Justice. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6350-0_4
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