ABSTRACTAs STEM students come to populate undergraduate courses in the liberal arts to fulfill university distribution requirements, they outnumber their humanities counterparts. A history professor and archivist working at a university that predominantly produces STEM majors have partnered to teach these students by utilizing the special collections related to engineering, innovation, and discovery in classroom work and assignments. This Critical Participation article presents the model of the ‘archive as laboratory’ to facilitate critical inquiry, introduce archival literacy to scientists and engineers, and expand students’ concept of information sources. Students gain an understanding that research questions can be addressed through multiple kinds of evidence that the archives is uniquely situated to provide. The immersive learning experience is enhanced by coursework that incorporates foundational theories and approaches from Science & Technology Studies. The lab model engages the archive as a hands-on workspace and a place where students can practice research skills. Engaging the archive as a laboratory fosters inquiry and critical thinking, and connects histories of innovation, problem identification, and design practice to students’ own majors and their future careers. It is relevant when a problem requires original solutions not found in existing manuals, textbooks, or online platforms.

Before getting to this issue’s contents I would first like to toast some good news for the journal. Every year Taylor & Francis sends me a packet of statistics, surveys, pie charts and the like sho...

ABSTRACTIn an interdisciplinary project-based course, the topic of ‘drones’ served as an essential boundary object both for the students themselves and instructors. Instructors developed the course to facilitate productive exchanges between students from schools of engineering and peace studies involved. In this critical participation paper, we use an experimental reflection and analysis method to explore the instructors’ experience with this class. We demonstrate how this boundary object both facilitated some of the most desirable outcomes related to interdisciplinary partnerships and interfered with them by making collaboration without consensus – or explicit disagreements – possible. The kinds of troublesome surprises that instructors reflect on might be understood as indicative of ecologies of ideas, priorities, and practices that students and instructors bring to the classroom. We suggest that other instructors might also benefit from reflecting on their experiences with interdisciplinarity in the way that we have here.

ABSTRACTBeginning with colonial times and continuing to the present, irrigation engineering has been and is an important site for the construction of gendered power and hegemonic masculinities. The strong connection between masculinities and professional irrigation cultures provides one possible explanation of why hydraulic bureaucracies are so resistant to change: it makes behaviours and codes of conduct that are learned seem natural. Taking inspiration from masculinity studies and from feminist studies of technology and organizations, this article proposes two possible lines of inquiry for critically disentangling how the irrigation profession becomes or is made masculine. The first is the feminist historical analysis of water bureaucracies, and the second is a critical ethnography of contemporary irrigation organizations. Such studies are needed both to create more space for women engineers in government water agencies and to contribute to unravelling important cultural aspects of water politics.

ABSTRACTIn this article, using the Department of Irrigation in Nepal as a case study, we argue that professional performance in irrigation engineering and water resources development is gendered and normalised as ‘masculine’. In Nepal, the masculinity of professional performance in irrigation engineering is located in intersections of gender, class, caste, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality and disciplinary education, and hinders especially female engineers to perform as a ‘normal’ engineer. Our analysis is based on interviews with male and female engineers in the department, documentation research, and ethnographic observations in the period 2005–2011. Our study suggests that professional performances and engineering identities in the organisation have always been tied to performances of masculinity. This implies that career prospects in the Nepalese irrigation department for female engineers remain grim; because for them to succeed and belong, they have to reconcile the near incommensurable: a performance of a ‘lady engineer’ with that of a ‘normal’ engineer.

This short paper comments upon a concern repeatedly voiced by would-be engineering education reformers, namely what to do about the profound instrumentalist orientation to education prevalent across engineering. Especially among promoters of engineering and liberal education integration, great anxiety arises in response to today's slide toward instrumentalist rationales for higher education generally and their acute manifestation within engineering programs in particular. This paper reviews one program's strategy for responding to this instrumentalism. Rather than merely augment the existing technical core with liberal education content, our program strives to frame the entire educational experience of our students: It seeks to provide the curricular, conceptual, and pedagogical frameworks to situate students’ engineering coursework (i.e. the technical core) as well as their identities within a more expansive vision of engineering in society. The paper reviews three mechanisms through which we embrace our students’ pragmatic impulses and then leverage them to help students reflect critically on the role of education in advancing their personal, educational, and career goals.

The article establishes some parallels in attitude and analogies in decision-making between the fictional underground explorations depicted in Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and contemporary engineering efforts to tap geothermal energy by drilling through the Earth's crust. It is argued that reconstructing these parallels can be a helpful way of uncovering previously little discussed assumptions and perhaps even deeply ingrained attitudes derived from specific perceptions of the geological underground. In the course of doing so, topics analyzed include the integration of old and new technologies, connections between responsibility and irrationality, failure as a normal stepping stone, or how unavoidable unknowns are being creatively incorporated into decision-making and practical strategies for probing into unfathomed depths.