[INES Announce] call for papers for Engineering Studies special issue "Interdisciplinary collaborations with engineers"

[Zhang, Shaozeng]

Dear all,
Check out below and attached the open call for papers for a special issue (2024) of the journal Engineering Studies.  Please feel free to ask me or Dr. Kristina Lyons if you have questions about this special issue.
We look forward to your contribution. Thank you!

Engineering Studies special issue
Call for Articles:
Interdisciplinary collaborations with engineers
The journal Engineering Studies invites submissions for a 2024 special issue focusing on social sciences and humanities scholars’ collaboration with engineers in academia, industry, or grassroots activism. We seek article manuscripts with deep theoretical engagement from social scientific and humanities perspectives based on direct collaboration in academic research, engineering design, and practice.
In transdisciplinary work, on the one hand, social sciences and humanities have long been marginalized as too critical and subjective, without applied value, or simply irrelevant especially from engineering perspectives. On the other hand, engineering, while a broad field itself, has been ambitiously aimed at resolving socially relevant problems, but may start with problems not properly defined in coordination with diverse actors in particular social-cultural contexts. What is worse, related prejudices and misunderstandings between different fields and lay and engineering know how further limits the mobilization, extent, and quality of cross-disciplinary collaboration and engaged engineering praxis (Forsythe 2001). However, increasingly complex engineering challenges, often in conjunction with shifting political and intensifying environmental conditions (e.g. Reddy 2023), demand innovative responses that reimagine, renegotiate, and innovate the collaborations between engineers, community actors, and other practitioners from the social and natural sciences and humanities.
We look forward to timely critical reflections on historical, contemporary, and ongoing collaborations to share with wider audiences and inspire future developments about the transdisciplinary potential of engineering. Can cross-disciplinary collaboration mobilize engaged methods and ethical concepts from social sciences and humanities in engineering practice (e.g. Burleson et al 2019)? How might multidisciplinary teams employ a more holistic approach to identifying and solving problems in real-world settings (e.g. Zhang et al 2018)? Would such collaboration help reconcile or further complicate competing parameters of public accountability and participatory strategies in engineering practice (Ballestero 2019; Smith 2021)?
We encourage submissions from social science and humanities scholars who participate in close collaboration with engineers and take such collaboration as first-hand field experience or an ethnographic site. We solicit submissions that are accessible to readers from multiple disciplines. Co-authorship with partners in other disciplines and outside of university contexts is welcome. Please send us an expression of interest with your paper abstract on one or multiple related topics, including but not limited to the following:

·       Engagement with social science and humanities research methods, concepts, and ethical premises in engineering practice;

·       Critical participation in collaborations amid competing onto-epistemic perspectives, ethical parameters, disciplinary/professional priorities, or political orientations that include engineering fields;

·       Historical precedents and roots of successes and failures, as well as potentials and challenges for, transdisciplinary collaboration in engineering projects;

·       Ethnographic exploration of the experiences and lessons learned from engaged, activist, or community-based engineering praxis
Please send your paper abstract to the guest editors of this special issue, Dr. Shaozeng Zhang at shaozeng.zhang at oregonstate.edu<mailto:shaozeng.zhang at oregonstate.edu> and Dr. Kristina M. Lyons at krlyons at sas.upenn.edu<mailto:krlyons at sas.upenn.edu> by August 20th, 2023. Submitted abstracts should not exceed 500 words excluding references, and should include research questions, method, and expected results. Please also inform us to which topic(s) you would like to contribute to with your manuscript.
References:
Ballestero, A. (2019). Touching with light, or, how texture recasts the sensing of underground water. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(5), 762-785.

Brown, R. R., Deletic, A., & Wong, T. H. (2015). Interdisciplinarity: How to catalyse collaboration. Nature, 525(7569), 315-317.

Burleson, G., Tilt, B., Sharp, K., & MacCarty, N. (2019). Reinventing boiling: A rapid ethnographic and engineering evaluation of a high-efficiency thermal water treatment technology in Uganda. Energy Research & Social Science, 52, 68-77.

Forsythe, D. (2001). Studying those who study us: An anthropologist in the world of artificial intelligence. Stanford University Press.

Reddy, E. (2023). ¡ Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground. The MIT Press.

Smith, J. M. (2021). Extracting accountability: Engineers and corporate social responsibility. The MIT Press.

Zhang, S., Zhao, B., & Ventrella, J. (2018). Towards an archaeological‐ethnographic approach to big data: Rethinking data veracity. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings (Vol. 2018, No. 1, pp. 62-85).



Shaozeng Zhang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor | Anthropology and STS
School of Language, Culture and Society | Oregon State University
210 Waldo Hall | Corvallis, Oregon 97331
Office: +1 (541) 737-3055
https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/users/shaozeng-zhang
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UUWMJ0UAAAAJ&hl=en

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