[INES Announce] New issue of Engineering Studies

[Jessica Smith]

Dear INES:

A pre-holiday treat – Issue 16.3 of Engineering Studies<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/test20/current>!

It includes an editorial by me that situates the three articles in relation to broader histories of the field tackling sociotechnical integration and critical infrastructure studies and then four excellent articles:

Pleasants, J. (2024). Engineering for Whom? Investigating How Engineering Students Develop and Apply Technoskeptical Thinking. Engineering Studies, 16(3), 159–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2024.2333242

College engineering education prioritizes technical knowledge and skills, but there is growing recognition that it must also address the social and societal implications of engineering work. Beyond professional ethics, engineers need to develop broader understandings of how engineering and technology interact with and impact individuals and communities. This study focuses on the development of engineering students’ ‘technoskeptical’ ways of thinking, defined as their ability to think about technologies as more than neutral tools and analyze their complex interactions with sociotechnical systems and values. Students in the study were incoming first-year engineering students who participated in a four-week summer bridge program. The program included a course called ‘engineering design for humans and the environment,’ which foregrounded sociotechnical issues and was designed to promote technoskeptical thinking. To assess students’ uptake of technoskepticism, they completed a pre and post task on which they analyzed the unintended effects of outdoor street lighting. Although students engaged in similar technoskeptical inquiries during the design course, this study found that students tended not to transfer those emergent skills to the street lighting task. The results indicate a need to expand instructional efforts so that students more fully internalize technoskeptical practices and apply them to novel situations.

Palmås, K. (2024). Engineering Judgment and Education: An Arendtian Account. Engineering Studies, 16(3), 184–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2024.2333239
This article discusses the meaning of judgment in engineering and engineering education, and it does so by introducing the work of political thinker Hannah Arendt. The argument presents Arendt’s non-cognitivist account of judgment as a counterpoint to prevailing conceptions of engineering judgment. Moreover, it suggests that Arendt’s unique perspective on what it means to be human in the context of modern technoscience is relevant to the discussion on the place of the humanities and liberal arts in engineering education.

Archidiacono, S., Kemerink-Seyoum, J. S., Leonardelli, I., Dominguez Guzman, C., Chitata, T., & Zwarteveen, M. (2024). Engineering as Tinkering Care: A Rainwater Harvesting Infrastructure in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Engineering Studies, 16(3), 206–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2024.2304176

In this article, we show how a rainwater harvesting system is made to work. Located at a school in the rural outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, the performance of the system depends on ongoing forms of sociotechnical tinkering: it works well because of the continuous fine-tuning, adaptations, negotiations, and adjustments that people engage in. Acknowledging this hinges on accepting that infrastructures are more fragile, emergent, and contingent than is normally allowed for in engineering textbooks. The language people mobilize to explain their acts of tinkering is also different from how engineers express what they do: they talk about care and caring – care for each other, for their children, for plants – and emphasize reciprocal responsibilities and collective concerns. For them, making water flow is not just about meeting goals of productivity and efficiency, but also about restoring and sustaining the infrastructure itself as well as the relations it supports and makes possible. It is a way of talking that expresses concerns of sustainability and justice. Our conclusion from studying this rainwater harvesting system is that there is merit in expanding and complementing prevailing notions of engineering as optimizing forms of control, with theorizations of engineering as forms of tinkering care.

Pereira, H. S. (2024). Critical Infrastructure in Historical Perspective: The Portuguese Railroad Network in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. Engineering Studies, 16(3), 226–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2024.2375503

In the 1850s, Portugal initiated an ambitious public works program spearheaded by railroads. In this article, I analyze how policymakers (congressmen, government officials, engineers, and military officers) debated and managed the construction and operation of the Portuguese railroad network using the theoretical framework of critical infrastructure. I show that railroads were deemed critical to modernize the country, draw it closer to the European core nations and further from the periphery, and to attract traffic to the Portuguese harbors. The absence of railroads was considered a vulnerability that could jeopardize Portugal as a nation and it fostered a sense of urgency that motivated policymakers to act, to a large extent, hastily. The construction of the network brought about other vulnerabilities that, for different motives, could threaten the future of the country. In a parallel way, the implementation of the system was marked by vulnerabilities that originated within or surrounding it, which limited its technical potential. Balancing between a literature review and the use of primary sources (parliamentary debates, technical reports, the press, and photography), I argue that the criticality associated with railroads, as a sociotechnical construction, was central to motivate their construction, but different vulnerabilities, inherent or external to the system, limited their influence and the advantages touted by its promoters.


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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