Foreword

What does engineering have to do with justice? This is a persistent question, among engineers and non-engineers alike, because we have not yet spent enough time making the connections between these two seemingly disparate spheres of action in society.

In fact, we have assumed, erroneously, that engineering has nothing to do with justice. We have assumed engineering is somehow a neutral actor on the world stage or in local communities, and yet we do not have to look very far to see how engineering decisions both impact and are impacted by justice considerations. For example, in the recent cases of Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler, software was designed with the explicit purpose of circumventing automobile emissions regulations, with consequences for ambient air quality and human health. We learn that decisions about sourcing and treatment methods in municipal water systems in Flint, MI, and Washington, DC, saved money but increased the lead content of drinking water for residents, disproportionately impacting low income and African American families.

We continue to accept too readily shallow explanations of the relationships between technology and society. We accept the assumption, without thinking, that the engineer just designs the technology, but bears no responsibility for how it is used. Or we accept too readily simplistic statements that give technology a singular and linear role in driving history: the printing press, or the automobile, or the Internet, we say, changed everything. We pay no regard to the historical conditions that gave rise to these technological developments, or specific choices in design and deployment that are not strictly technologically determined but tell rich stories of interplay in complex sociotechnical systems.

We accept too readily the facile self-aggrandizing pronouncements of members of the profession that engineers help society. To truly answer the question of what engineering has to do with justice, we must also be willing to examine closely and carefully what engineering has to do with injustice.

Once we are able to confront the possibilities for engineering to take place within, and contribute to, systems of injustice, we can begin to identify how engineering might be able to contribute to, or even bring about, more just realities for people and the planet.

As the authors of this book put it:

Given the power of engineering, we need an engineering education that is tailored to the great responsibility engineers will assume in transforming life in the rest of the 21st century and beyond. Engineers design, build and operate complex and imposing systems, capable of influencing the lives of millions of people, as well as the allocation of resources (e.g., water, energy), opportunities (e.g., access to work and commerce), risks and harms (e.g., flooding, nuclear disasters, groundwater contamination), and how different social groups receive these differently.

They argue not only that engineers can work for justice, but also that we have a moral responsibility to do so. Of any engineering activity, it is not only possible but also morally imperative to ask the central questions of social justice, who benefits and who suffers:

Who and what is engineering for? From how engineering is taught and practiced, who benefits? Who does not benefit from engineering advances? Who suffers or is constrained by what is created?

As an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I chose to study engineering out of a deep concern for the environment. Yet I struggled to connect my campus activism on environmental issues with what I learned in class. As the environmental justice movement raised concerns about the inequitable distribution of environmental harms by race and by class, I saw no recognition, let alone a thoughtful response, from the engineering community. This book gives me hope that today's engineering students will have a different experience, where relevant justice concerns are taken up as part and parcel of what engineers do.

Can justice be engineered? As global neoliberal economic and political orders have waxed and then waned over the last several decades, a social justice resistance has emerged to challenge the status quo with increasingly intersectional strategies of solidarity, learning to organize across race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, ability, and many other difference categories. However, engineers remain largely invisible as activists. As American scientists organize a march on the Trump White House and the Administration's utter disregard for science and nature itself, it remains to be seen how many engineers will participate and what perspectives we will bring.

The central problem lies in engineers' tendency to compartmentalize, to separate not only the technical and social in a false dichotomy, but also the professional and the personal, what it means to act as an engineer versus as a citizen. Yet, engineers are whole people, at once moral beings, citizens (of communities, nations, and planets), with obligations to act out of multiple duties in multiple roles. While the primary focus of the book is to scope criteria for engineering actions for social justice in a professional context, it is helpful to keep in mind that engineers also act in the world as whole people, as citizens, and as activists. This line is not cleanly drawn; what compels an engineer to support or oppose a pipeline, for example, is as much technical as it is social, and as much professional as it is personal.

Justice can be engineered, but it can also be sung, danced, written, painted, sculpted, historicized, politicked, philosophized, calculated, experimented, and simply felt. Those of us who work for justice must bring our whole selves to the work, with multiple approaches both instinctual and cerebral, and knowledge drawn from every frame of humanity's collective experience. As an activist and as an engineer, I have challenged pipelines and nuclear power plants, and defended access to reproductive health technologies. It mattered that there was an engineer's body on the line at the women's health clinic, an engineer's wrists handcuffed in arrest for civil disobedience, and an engineer's legs tired from marching. It also mattered that I was undertaking these actions alongside food service workers, lawyers, teachers, clergy people, accountants, garbage haulers, builders, parents, students, artists, and clerical workers, all putting their bodies on the line for the same cause.

How can engineers prepare for a world that demands their engagement with justice? A central argument of this book is that engineering education is presently mismatched with what is needed in engineering practice, and does not prepare engineers to meet the responsibilities of the profession. Today's typical engineering students graduate ill-equipped to properly frame and define engineering problems and solution spaces, to adequately identify the benefits and constraints of engineering, to holistically conceive of sustainability in their work, and to commit fully to dismantle power and privilege in an effort to foster diversity and inclusion.

We learn why it is that US engineering curricula seem to be stuck in remnants of the Cold War Era, revering engineering science as a "sacred cow" and resisting sociotechnical understandings of engineers' work. We learn why current attempts to teach ethics or social dimensions of engineering as one-off courses or modular add-ons are ultimately insufficient for bringing social justice considerations from margin to center in engineering.

how might the engineering curriculum itself, rather than just the extracurricular accouterments, play a role in attracting and keeping highly talented students in engineering? Our approach goes where few have gone before: into the heart and soul of the engineering curriculum, the place where much of a young engineer's identity is forged and formed.

In a chapter-by-chapter examination of aspects of engineering curricula (design, engineering sciences), the authors show us how "Not only can good engineering and social justice exist simultaneously, but it can be argued that the very definition of good engineering is taking into account social justice." In the engineering design space, we see the most sophisticated case studies of how social justice can be explicitly framed (or rendered invisible) throughout the process from problem formulation to implementation. In the discussion of engineering sciences, we gain a historical understanding of why it has been so difficult to integrate social justice considerations into these core "technical" courses, and we see how, in fact, social justice considerations are already endemic in these courses, and how these aspects can be brought to the fore. In the chapter on humanities and social sciences, we again gain historical knowledge of how social aspects of engineering came to be seen as outside the purview of the discipline, and why our present moment is a time ripe for reintegration of these concerns.

What ties together the curricular considerations and the practice of engineering for social justice is a set of considerations around problem definition and human dimensions of engineering activities. By critically interrogating problem definition, the authors operationalize social justice questions within the core of the engineering curriculum:

what is placed into the problem, what and who is left out, who draws the borders of what stays in and is...