[INES Announce] Join us this Monday Sep 30 at 12pm EDT: Sørensen and Traweek at the Engineering Studies Working Group

[Ryan Hearty]

Dear INES members,

This Monday, 30 September at 12pm EDT, we begin the fall season of the Engineering Studies working group!

All are welcome, and instructions for joining our group can be found here: https://www.chstm.org/groups.

This season features two more discussions with authors of recently published books:

  1.
Friday, 25 October from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm EDT. A discussion with Guru Madhavan, author of Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393651461.
  2.
Friday, 22 November from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm EST. A discussion with Konstantinos Chatzis, author of Forecasting Travel in Urban America: The Socio-Technical Life of an Engineering Modeling World, Engineering Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10359.001.0001.

On Monday, join us for one hour at 12pm EDT as we meet Knut H. Sørensen and Sharon Traweek, authors of Questing Excellence in Academia: A Tale of Two Universities (London: Routledge, 2022). The book is available open-access: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429290633. We've attached a reading guide from Knut and Sharon below.

See you Monday!

Best wishes,

Ryan Hearty and Ellan Spero, co-chairs

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Ryan Hearty, Ph.D.
Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University

Ellan F. Spero, Ph.D.
Instructor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Co-Founder and Professor of the Practice, Station1

On behalf of the "Engineering Studies" working group at CHSTM
https://www.chstm.org/content/engineering-studies-0

Recommend a topic for discussion!
https://forms.gle/qDZkkNJBBG8uLnFMA


To build our argument about variations in global higher education we juxtapose changes at two public universities over the last 75 years: NTNU and UC/UCLA, both prominent and serving wealthy regions. We claim that universities are disciplined by multiple forces to generate both public and private goods. We focus on the changing cultural, economic, material, political, and social techniques and technologies of both the disciplining and generative processes at NTNU and UCLA, as well as the different strategies those two universities have developed for adapting to and avoiding the changing demands imposed upon them.

We show that there is no singular ‘neo-liberal university’ but a patterned array of strategic engagements with differently configured local and global ecologies. Among other positions we argue that the current governing infrastructures are unsustainable; we also claim that teaching about our research is the primary way that universities engage with innovations in global political economies. We present 4 concepts to convey our interpretative strategies: domesticating, co-morphing, meshworking, and faultlines. Some key topics in our interpretation are sustainability, funding, governance, rankings, revenue streams, reputations, factions, and the required 'subject formation' of students, faculty, and administrators.

Tersely, we suggest reading pages 5-9, 13-22, 26-35, note the keywords listed on pages 221-225, and then pick a chapter of interest to you. There are very brief histories of NTNU and UCLA, plus the systems in which they are embedded on pages 26-32. The book’s argument is summarized on 5-9 and the book’s structure is described on 33-35. Our recommendations are presented 200-205. We use archival, ethnographic, and interview research methods, as described on pages 18-22. We invoke and challenge scholarship from four fields: higher education studies, organization studies, and history of universities, plus Science, Technology, and Society studies (STS), as discussed on pages 13-18.

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