[INES Announce] New issue of Engineering Studies

[Jessica Smith]

Dear INES,
We are very excited to announce Issue 16.2 of Engineering Studies, which is a special work on engineers’ boundary work edited by Jongheon Kim & Ivan Sainsaulieu. I also want to especially thank Jongmin Lee for serving as the Associate Editor for all of the articles, along with all of the article reviewers.
Happy summer,
Jessica


Kim, J., & Sainsaulieu, I. (2024). Exploring Engineers’ Boundary Work. Engineering Studies, 16(2), 79–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2024.2367287

This special issue aims to advance the scholarly understanding of engineers’ boundary work, focusing on their professional knowledge and their interaction strategies as they navigate complex challenges. Specifically, the essays collected here explore how engineers fortify, adapt, or overstep boundaries between themselves and other domains of knowledge or groups of actors, as they confront new challenges.

Roby, C. (2024). Humanities and Social Sciences in French Engineering Education: A Sociohistory of their Integration in an Apolitical Stance. Engineering Studies, 16(2), 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2024.2352351

In France, the social consequences of industrial development have long been questioned, but technological disasters of the last decades of the twentieth century led to a rethinking of Western ways of life and production. Engineering education has faced the challenge of taking these considerations into account via the humanities and social sciences (HSS) curricula, including themes ranging from work organizations to science and technology in society. Taking a sociohistorical approach, this article describes the apolitical stance of the integration of HSS into French engineering education. Following a problematization within the framework of curriculum sociology, the first part presents the sociohistorical context of French engineering education, with a particular focus on HSS. The second part highlights the difficulties of recognizing the scientific and critical nature of HSS in the larger engineering educational system. The article then presents the results of a review of current HSS curricula as posted on school websites, which reveals a pattern that HSS are taught in an apolitical stance, based in corporate themes rather than questioning the social order or science and technology in society. The review suggests that only a handful of schools have been able to break the boundaries between the engineering sciences and HSS.

Kim, J. (2023). The Human Brain Project Between Politics, Science, and Engineering. Engineering Studies, 16(2), 108–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2023.2277197

This article investigates the unfolding of increased political interest in research infrastructure at the practical level. As a case study, I examine the European Commission’s (EC) Human Brain Project (HBP). The HBP is a large-scale interdisciplinary project that aims to build a web-accessible digital research infrastructure for neuroscience, medical research, and information technology. The project provides a unique study case for observing interdisciplinary interaction within a large-scale project for infrastructure building in brain science, where small-scale research has been the norm. I analyze how the stances of the EC and the HBP members on the project’s goal and organization have co-evolved by focusing on the project’s two radical reorientations. Thus, I describe the HBP’s tangled trajectory as the result of the project’s shifting definition between research and infrastructure construction or between politics, science, and engineering.

Bouzin, A. (2023). Negotiating Engineering and Activism: French Environmentalist Engineers Conforming to, Shifting, and Overstepping Professional Boundaries. Engineering Studies, 16(2), 133–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2023.2286957

This paper explores three different forms of negotiation implemented by environmentalist engineers between their professional work and their environmental activism. These engineers, members of environmentalist organizations, appropriate in different ways this conceptual professional boundary that separates and opposes the social worlds of engineering and activism. The article draws from narrative interviews with 50 environmentalist engineers that focused on the dynamics of these negotiations and their effects on biographical trajectories. The process of conforming, shifting or overstepping the boundary between profession and activism is linked to the framing of environmental causes. The precarious balances these engineers strike between work and activism thus depend on three factors: the emergence (or not) of a professional reflexivity, the adoption (or not) of a political interpretation and the reaction of hierarchical superiors and company management.


Jessica M. Smith<https://www.jessicamsmith.net/> (she/her/hers)
Editor-in-chief, Engineering Studies<https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/test20>
Professor, Engineering, Design, and Society Department<https://www.mines.edu/eds/>
Colorado School of Mines

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