preface

In engineering, interest in community engagement, such as Learning Through Service and Citizen Science initiatives, is mounting. Funding to address local and global crises through such engagement is also on the rise. Although engineers are not formally trained to interact with communities, community engagement tends to place them in positions of power over people who are often vulnerable and disenfranchised, and who have markedly different experiences, knowledges, histories, needs, and priorities from those of engineers.

The Engineering Ethics & Community Rights Collaborative was created by a coalition of affected community members, grassroots community organizations, engineers, engineering educators, scientists, social scientists, and NGOs working at the intersection of science and society, on the basis of the following condition:

That prevailing community engagement practices might at times perpetuate injustice and replicate or exacerbate local and global crises. To prevent such outcomes, we must recognize that engineers’ interventions in spaces of need or crisis are never “neutral” or “apolitical,” even when they involve “only” research. We must thus work to reimagine community engagement as an approach to teaching, learning, and serving that is rooted in principles of professional accountability and justice, and that is evaluated on the basis of these principles not only by the engineering profession but also by the communities it sets out to help.

Premise

Our work is rooted in the premise that good intentions, as important and necessary as they are, do not ensure engineering interventions that marginalized communities experience as beneficial and just. Moreover, the engineering profession’s lack of training in community engagement can have severe and adverse impacts not only on communities but also on engineers themselves. We propose that if engineers lack:

• A platform that highlights community voices,

• A mindset that prioritizes listening to those voices, and

• A toolkit that allows adjustment and refinement of engineering practice on the basis of those voices,

they are left vulnerable to carrying out interventions that are ineffective and that the very publics they aim to serve experience as inadequate, inappropriate, and even harmful.

We believe that engineering education and, by extension, the engineering profession at large can place engineers in a paradoxical bind by, on the one hand, instructing them to “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public” while, on the other hand, leaving them sub-optimally equipped to do so in a way that the diverse communities with which they engage recognize as helpful. This bind can encourage paternalistic engineering practice, including speaking on behalf of communities without community authorization; implementing technical and non-technical “fixes” without community participation or consent; appropriating community knowledges, networks, and resources; or turning against communities that question the value of the engagement offered to them.

promise

Our goal is to help redress:

• The gap between training and practice in engineering’s community engagement activities, and

• The absence of community voices — including community definitions of “desirable” and “morally sound” engineering interventions as well as diverse lived experiences — from engineering conceptualizations of “serving the public good,”

in order to plant a seed for successful and rewarding community engagement. Our aim is to open up space for the exploration of engineering training requirements, principles of engagement, and mandated mechanisms of oversight and accountability. Our belief is that we are in need of a courageous, inspired, honest, and creative national conversation about community rights in community engagement projects, including, for example, the right to autonomy, self-determination, and safe spaces to which communities can turn to report problems and be heard, without risking further marginalization or retaliation.

We are excited and filled with hope about this work!

If you’d like to get involved, please fill out this form.

In solidarity,

Yanna Lambrinidou, PhD and Nathan Canney, PhD, PE
Coordinators