This report documents the 2025 program of the Liberal Education/Engineering and Society (LEES) Division at the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), held June 22–25, 2025 in Montreal, Canada. We discuss the how the Division’s planned themes – sociotechnical integration, truth and reconciliation in engineering, engineering and climate change, and engineering and conflict – were reflected in the program, and highlight an emergent theme of ‘critical mutuality' that developed during the conference itself. Finally, we reflect on the relationship between the LEES Division and its constituent scholarly communities of engineering studies and engineering education.

Responsibility is a core concept for engineering ethics, yet it is often used ambiguously and is subject to various interpretations. Given that the mission statements of engineering higher education institutions, accreditation requirements, and engineering professional codes are built on a language of responsibility, it is important to have a structured approach that includes its evolving dimensions. This article surveys the engineering ethics literature to identify historical developments and develop a conceptual framework for defining the diverse responsibilities engineers have qua engineers. This conceptual framework categorizes engineering responsibilities at four analytical levels (Micro/Macro and Subject/Object). Micro-Subject responsibilities address the values, characteristics, and decision-making of individual engineers. Micro-Object responsibilities address the values, characteristics, and culture of organizations where an engineer practices. Macro-Subject responsibilities address the values, mission and decision-making of the engineering profession or collectives. Macro-Object responsibilities address the social, economic and political structures and context driving engineering practice. The framework provides a practical tool for engineering curriculum development and accreditation processes by providing clear formulations for setting learning objectives and graduate attributes that support the embedding of responsibility across the curriculum and across accreditation requirements.

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.

The Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (PSVT:R) is commonly used in engineering education to measure spatial ability in efforts to predict academic or vocational success, or as a placement test. However, the politics of the instrument are rarely discussed. Here I provide a critical review of the historical literature that provides the basis for current work using the PSVT:R. I examine the validation and popularization of the PSVT:R, discuss how the instrument may not actually measure mental rotation, and explain how the construct of ‘gestalt processing’ was created in an effort to raise the status of spatial instruments which favored men. I argue that the isometric imagery style used in the test, which is rooted in the masculinized discipline of engineering graphics, further politicizes the test. I discuss the usage of the PSVT:R in spatial training efforts targeting historically excluded groups, and how understanding the politics of the PSVT:R should inform future efforts.

ABSTRACT While many early-career engineers in the United States leave the field of engineering in the first few years of their careers, we know little of their early professional experiences and reasoning for career plans. We conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with early-career engineers, comparing the experiences of engineers across intersections of gender and race. In particular, we examine meaningful early-career experiences and how these connect to the innate needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as well as career intentions. Top moments on the job were often first-time experiences and milestones that enhanced the engineers’ sense of competence. Meaningful moments connected to relatedness were more often positive than negative experiences for White men, whereas experiences undermining relatedness were more common for people of color and/or women. Connections to autonomy emerged more in bottom moments, especially for White engineers. Across different intended career pathways, early-career engineers often evaluated their experiences regarding their ability to work effectively and through social validation from peers and managers (or undermined by a lack thereof). The results indicate the need for a greater understanding of early-career affordances in supporting entry and retention in the engineering workforce by promoting individual effectiveness and social validation.

Research suggests the normative culture of engineering perpetuates the marginalization of individuals with excluded identities, contributing to a lack of diversity in academia and the workforce. As evidenced by recent funding opportunities, stakeholders view diversity and inclusion (D&I) as critical to broadening participation, and many engineering units have espoused their commitment to D&I efforts. However, additional research is needed to better understand how institutional contexts shape D&I efforts occurring in academic engineering units. This multiple case study examined engineering units at three U.S. universities that received the same National Science Foundation grant to cultivate an inclusive engineering culture. Drawing from the field of organizational theory, I analyzed data from 11 interviews and 209 pages of documents to understand how university context shaped engineering D&I efforts. The theory of neoinstitutionalism was used as a lens to understand similarities and differences among the cases. Findings suggest D&I efforts were heavily shaped by institutional contexts including the desire for prestige, availability of resources, and pressure from internal and external stakeholders. Implications for policymakers, funding agencies, and engineering leaders point to the need to re-imagine markers of engineering education legitimacy.

One of the things I appreciate about the engineering studies community is that we are welcoming of new scholars, both those who are early in their career and those who are turning to engineering studies after having developed their career in other academic spaces.Our reviewers are generous with their time and attention to

Engineering education is under the sway of wide-ranging dynamics and drifts that have bearing on how education is enacted in relation to the research and innovation obligations of universities. Academic, applied, and third mission drifts seem to configure higher education in new ways. The article sets out to critically explore how knowledge production is discursively enacted in the teaching-research-practice-nexus in engineering universities of applied science (UAS) in Denmark. This paradigmatic case study maps discursive positionings and discusses how these positionings aspire to transform engineering education in the light of the wide-ranging drifts in higher education. Based on 17 qualitative in-depth interviews with researchers, teachers, and managers, the article maps the discursive positions taken and not-taken in relation to the enactment of the teaching-research-practice-nexus. The exploration is guided by a theory-method-package inspired by situational analysis and interviewing methods developed in practice-based approaches as interview-to-the-double. The analysis identifies four discursive positions in the teaching-research-practice-nexus that enact knowledge production in engineering UAS differently. Furthermore, three unavailable discursive positions are identified. Interpretive flexibility makes different discursive enactments of knowledge production possible. The study concludes that (1) that the primary mission of UAS in Denmark is teaching; research and engagement with practice are subordinate missions; (2) that the applied and third mission drift has been effective in instituting alternative discursive enactments; (3) some positions are seemingly discursively illegitimate. The undisputability of the educational mission – and the applied and third mission drifts – seems to effectively outweigh academic drift in the Danish UAS.

Engineering occupations coevolved with industries producing material outputs: mining, construction, manufacturing. Yet wealthy economies have long been moving toward intangible services, the products of industries including finance, wholesale and retail trade, entertainment, travel and transportation, health care, and the public sector (including, e.g. much of education). For the United States the shift is evident in statistical data going back well over a century and services now account for nearly 90 percent of all employment. The job share is lower for engineers, but even so the majority work for service-producing entities. Entanglement and interdependence of services and goods hinders understanding of the dynamics, as does rapid growth in jobs classed in official employment statistics as computer-related even though much of the work resembles engineering. Because of this, field studies that explore actual job content will be needed to develop clearer pictures of the everyday tasks employers assign technical workers in postindustrial economies.