<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Dear colleagues via INES-Announce,</div><div><br></div><div>I consider Engineering Studies a great field in which to investigate the larger human question: how do we live with the
<b>idea(l)s of "professionalism" </b>that we have created in our
societies, and the problems that can follow from what these ideals enact in practice? </div><div><br></div><div>In the upcoming <i>Engineering Studies </i>journal issue, I made a small historically-grounded argument that speaks to this question: </div><div><br></div><div>I described how gatekeeping the edges of 'engineering' is discursively presented as an 'ethical' imperative in Australian engineering ethics codes. In order to describe all the different kinds of social goods evoked in the archival codes of ethics, I needed to conceptually bridge two empirical interests: how 'ethics' are discursively constructed within the privileged sphere of well-paid and socially-legitimated 'skilled work' in engineering; and how inclusion or exclusion from that privileged sphere is constructed, including the political question of who gets to decide whom to exclude. As I wrote on p.3, my article observes "how institutional languages of idealism relate to institutional projects of gatekeeping−mindful that such languages and projects not only transform cultural and political meanings, but also affect class reproduction." Hence, in order to account for the material, I ended up speaking about professionalism in relation to the threat of <b>classism</b>. </div><div><br></div><div>I also appreciate Engineering Studies as a field in which we get to think through a hugely practical human problem: <span><span dir="ltr"><b>technological harms, slow violence, and the myriad
damages</b> that can accompany engineering projects. Where do they come from, and can they be stopped? </span></span></div><div><span><span dir="ltr"><br></span></span></div><div><span><span dir="ltr">This was heavy on my mind as I
took up the empirical interest in how ethics codes construct "responsible engineering." </span></span> As paraphrased from my article's introduction, p.2, I was curious how it has been <span><span dir="ltr">possible for
engineers to be BOTH ethical and responsible (according to their codes
of ethics) AND ALSO agents of violence (as we empirically see around the world.) How is this paradox sustained over time, without resolution?</span></span></div><div><span><span dir="ltr"><br></span></span></div><div><span><span dir="ltr">The answer the Australian data posed to this was that in the codes, ethical behavior has historically tended to be presented in terms of behavior towards clients and fellow engineers, including preserving peers' reputations and what could be broadly called fair competition practices (see Table 1). The requirement to </span></span>not use membership titles or definitions wrongly functionally consolidated 'gatekeeping' authority within the centralized national professional association, which from 1966 to the present has also emphasized <i>recognizing the limits of one's expertise</i> as an ethical mandate. It is possible to infer that the relatively recent and increasingly complex task of meeting social demands for "sustainability" has entered into a cultural interaction with the long-running themes of 'Practicing only within one’s areas of competence' and preserving peers' reputations, to discourage Australian engineers from speaking out in public against engineering projects they perceive as harmful--because perhaps they would not feel confident that they would have all the information or 'areas of competence' to make a competent judgment, and perhaps they would harm specific peer engineers by doing so--which itself, seen against the arc of this specific archival history, would be an ethical failure. </div><div><br></div><div>Read the full paper open-access here, courtesy of the LMU library:
<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19378629.2025.2556378" target="_blank">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19378629.2025.2556378</a> </div><div><br></div><div>Thank you to all of the colleagues who responded to and engaged with this work at last year's INES meeting. I hope to continue meeting with you about topics of classism, sustainability, engineering-based violence, and the complexity of 'inclusion' into professional practices and spheres that are themselves contested. If you are working or have worked on similar interests, please feel free to write and plan a Zoom coffee break with me for social networking, or directly send me your writings as well, or both. </div><div><br></div><div>best,</div><div><br></div><div>Mallory (she/her)</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>
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<div>Dr. Mallory James</div>
<div><font style="vertical-align:inherit"><font style="vertical-align:inherit">Gastwissenschaftlerin |
Visiting Scientist</font></font></div>
<div>Empirische Kulturwissenschaft und Europäische
Ethnologie | European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis </div>
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München | LMU Munich</div>
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<div>Associate Editor, <i>IEEE Technology and Society Magazine</i> </div>
<div>IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology
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