On the Engineering Studies Department website at Lafayette College, this course of study is described as a curriculum that provides students with the skills necessary to combine understandings of culture, technology, society, politics, economics, and environmental issues into a cohesive whole, acknowledging that all of these seemingly disparate yet entwined elements must work in concert for technologies to function well. While having such coursework available for students is a boon for the college, a similar understanding of the interconnectedness of the societal contexts of such technical work does not seem to be valued in the same manner in other engineering disciplines at the college. For instance, the websites of the mechanical, civil, electrical, and chemical engineering departments discuss the many technical aspects of the education that students will be exposed to over their time here, with mentions of the greater contexts of such work conspicuously absent, other than a few brief mentions of electives in the humanities and social sciences.

As many scholars, including professors here at this school have argued, technology is inseparable from the contexts in which it is created and used, critically in the context of racial dynamics. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues in her article “Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race”, that in fact, “Race is a technology and dominant paradigm for societal control”, “Humans and technology,” as Bernard Stiegler has argued, evolve together. “Race, it therefore follows, has never been simply biological or cultural; rather, it has been crucial to negotiating and establishing historically variable definitions of biology and culture.” (Chun, 2009, p.8). Expanding upon this idea, Smedley and Smedley write in their article “Race as Biology is Fiction, Race as a Social Issue is Real”,

“In the early 18th century, usage of the term increased in the written record, and it began to become standardized and uniform (Poliakov, 1982). By the Revolutionary era, race was widely used, and its meaning had solidified as a reference for social categories of Indians, Blacks, and Whites (Allen, 1994, 1997; A. Smedley, 1999b). More than that, race signified a new ideology about human differences and a new way of structuring society that had not existed before in human history. The fabrication of a new type of categorization for humanity was needed because the leaders of the American colonies at the turn of the 18th century had deliberately selected Africans to be permanent slaves (Allen, 1994, 1997; Fredrickson, 1988, 2002; Morgan, 1975; A. Smedley, 1999b).8 In an era when the dominant political philosophy was equality, civil rights, democracy, justice, and freedom for all human beings, the only way Christians could justify slavery was to demote Africans to nonhuman status (Haller, 1971; A. Smedley, 1999b). The humanity of the Africans was debated throughout the 19th century, with many holding the view that Africans were created separately from other, more human, beings.”

In The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander develops the argument of Race being a technology of social control that is baked into the basic structures, physical and societal, that pervade today’s American society. Her book specifically discusses how these systems have been used to create an industrial prison complex that provides a labor force for many corporations, effectively continuing systems of oppression that grew out of the chattel slave trade, sharecropping, and the Jim Crow systems.

“The unfortunate reality we must face is that racism manifests itself not only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic structure of society. Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.

What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to restrict its freedom. By the same token, not every aspect of a racial caste system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black people in order for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage.” (Alexander, 2010, p. 179)

In her book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Ruha Benjamin makes a case that in the world of automated systems and artificial intelligence, the very engineered world we live in, race continues to be a lens through which data and society is overwhelmingly organized, and through the works of other authors such as Safiya Umoja Noble, it becomes clear that ongoing issues of systemic racism in technical systems are reinforced and constructed by the very infrastructural and socio-technical landscape that forms the engineered foundations of today’s society. Taking such analyses into account it becomes clear that the basis of any engineering education must include an understanding and analysis of the racial and societal implications of its impacts in order to mitigate the continued dominance of white supremacy and avoid the reinforcement of existing racial hierarchies. Throughout the rest of this project, we worked to create an understanding of the necessity for the integration of a racial justice framework into the entirety of the engineering program here at Lafayette and worked to develop potential avenues through which such lessons could be added to the curriculum.

In order to develop approaches to this issue, we sought to answer several questions in our work. First, we asked, “What current practices does Lafayette college have that promote anti-racist education, and what limitations exist at the college that may inhibit these practices? Are there currently systemic racial issues within the engineering department?” By answering this question, our intent was to develop an understanding of the current climate at the school, and whether there were existing programs that could be expanded or further developed to accomplish such goals. In addition, we intended to uncover any existing issues that may hamper efforts to develop an antiracist pedagogy in the broader engineering department. To further address this we also asked the question, “How does the current state of race & technology education at Lafayette reinforce and/or address racist paradigms?”

To develop approaches to anti-racist education that the professors and administration of the school could use, we attempted to determine how to integrate anti-racist pedagogy into a technical discipline. Drawing from already existing resources on the subject, we looked to other schools and institutions that have made similar efforts to incorporate lessons of racial justice and an understanding of community and environmental contexts into their engineering programs. We interviewed professors in the Lafayette engineering department including Professors Rossman and Sanford, student organizations, and facility centers such as the Hanson center to better understand what can be done to better incorporate anti-racist pedagogy into STEM education. In these interviews, we found that it does not seem to be the new faculty that is having the most trouble with this transition, it is those who have gone through generations of teaching that did not include the human perspective. Through our interviews we found the most common trend to be that the human part of engineering needs to be re-emphasized. ABET Accreditations recently changed Engineering Curriculum standards to also include a section on DEI. While this is not the ultimate solution, it will certainly push curriculum creators and department heads to change their focus from purely technical. In order to create an engineering program that effectively avoids and seeks to equip graduates with the tools needed to address the systemic injustices that have been present throughout the history of engineering as a discipline, professors must teach their students that understanding and centering on the contexts of their work is just as, if not more vital than the technical design concepts that they are learning. Engineering—as a discipline—is inherently not objective and removed from the surrounding world; Rather, the communities it builds, ranging from neighborhoods to global scale, are ingrained in each decision and foundation.

To address these issues, we created several potential options for professors and the administration to draw on. We developed a syllabus review program for the school to use, with an example lesson plan for a class on urban development and electrical engineering which can be found in the technical section. This solution was based on the conclusion we came to through our research and interview with Professor Rossman where we determined that approaching this issue by giving professors the tools necessary to integrate lessons into their preexisting classes would be the most sound approach within the constraints of time and money that we had.

To read about the Social Context of this project click here.