LEES 2023 Conference Wrap-up
Dear LEES Community,
Thank you all for your contributions to our ASEE conference in Baltimore. Thanks to the authors of our 50 papers for sharing their scholarship, to the session moderators who facilitated wonderful discussions of that work, and to the reviewers whose constructive feedback guided authors in communicating their work to a wide and interdisciplinary audience.
At our business meeting we heard LEES described as home: “nourishing,” “inspiring,” “welcoming,” “invigorating.” Our panel of former winners of the Sterling Olmsted Award spoke of the bold, “radical” ways scholars in LEES are critically analyzing engineering education and implementing “disruptive” and meaningful change. The conference made vivid our collective will toward such liberatory and justice-oriented change, and I’m grateful to have been in community with all of you.
This year was marked by a particularly resonant panel discussion in our topical plenary cosponsored with the ECSJ/EQUITY division. Amy Slaton, Kayla Maxey, Sepehr Vakil, and Meagan Pollock spoke to the need to understand the sociopolitical values implicit in engineering, and to articulate explicitly and hold ourselves accountable for our desired values. (We regret that Stephanie Masta, who participated in developing the panel and had planned to be part of it, was unable to attend ASEE this year.) Sepehr Vakil’s remarks are also available here. The plenary panel’s argument that engineering education must “say the words” rather than permitting passive-voice euphemisms and innocence-making framings to dodge the necessary work of antiracist, anticolonial, liberatory, feminist, queer, politically conscious transformation is particularly resonant in the context of ongoing regressive activism in legislatures and Courtrooms. Thanks to those who attended and shared insightful and provocative thoughts and questions. Acknowledging the historical and political forces that will continue to act to exclude, erase, and harm unless acted intentionally against is crucial, as is accountability for resisting those forces.
Our decompression session made time and space to acknowledge the pressures on the scholarships and selves of LEES community members in the current climate. If you’d like to continue our strategizing to name and address those pressures, please reach out to me directly. We are grateful to have learned from community leaders working on sociotechnical justice in Baltimore City in a panel moderated by Foad Hamidi, and for their collaborative white paper on academic-community partnership and coalition building.
Congratulations to our best paper, “Dignity and well-being: Narratives of modifying the culture of engineering education to improve mental health among underrepresented STEM students,” by Katherine Robert and Jon Leydens, which was also selected as the Best PIC I Paper of 2023. Please read the paper here. Our best DEI-related paper, “Someone like you: Theorizing LGBTQ participation in engineering through network homophily and state authenticity,” by Bryce Hughes and Sidrah MG Watson, can be read here. I also offer deep (and still stunned) gratitude to the Division for bestowing upon me the 2023 Sterling Olmsted award.
We are grateful to our partner divisions ECSJ/EQUITY, CED, ETHICS, and INES for co-hosting our second cross-divisional social event which was a great success thanks in particular to the planning efforts of Megan Kenny Feister. Thanks to our sponsors, the Lafayette College Engineering Division and the Humanitarian Engineering program at Colorado School of Mines.
I couldn’t be more delighted that Marie Stettler Kleine will serve as Program Chair for the 2024 ASEE meeting in Portland, Oregon, and that we’ve welcomed Kari Zacharias to our LEES leadership team as Program Chair-Elect. Sean Ferguson steps into the LEES Division Chair role for 23-24; warm thanks to Juan Lucena for his service as Division Chair this year and for his continued stewardship and contributions to our community. Our stellar team also includes communications guru Megan Kenny Feister, treasurer Desen Ozkan (whose thoughtful service was particularly appreciated in a budget-austerity year!), and CDEI liaison Janet Tsai.
Please take advantage of an upcoming opportunity to continue the LEES-y conversation – the Union College Engineering & Liberal Education Symposium will be held this September. Watch your inbox for our LEES newsletters, and please join the linkedin community to stay connected!
With gratitude and In solidarity,
Jenn Stroud Rossmann, Your 22-23 LEES Program Chair
Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division Call for Papers
The Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division invites abstracts for papers and poster proposals for full sessions, panel discussions, workshops, and non-traditional session formats for the ASEE Annual Conference, June 25 – 28, 2023 in Baltimore, MD. LEES is interested in the role of the humanities, arts, social sciences, identity studies, and communication in engineering education, and in the role of engineering in broad and relevant liberal education. LEES welcomes proposals related to any of the diverse areas falling within the scope of our division, including but not limited to: critical analysis of social and ethical dimensions of technoscience; situation of engineering within larger social, historical, political, and cultural contexts; course- and curricular-level integration of engineering and the humanities, arts, and social sciences; and development, study, and transformation of engineering education programs.
LEES welcomes papers on any topic pertaining to the broader division goals, but is especially encouraging papers pertaining to the following specific themes for the 2023 conference. Engineering processes and products are value-laden; work in LEES calls attention to implicit and explicit values in engineering education.
- Liberatory Engineering Education /Centering Justice in Engineering Education: We seek stories of efforts to ensure that engineering education advances values of justice: anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia; social, economic, and environmental justice. Efforts centering justice and liberation are distinct from conservative/assimilationist structures that maintain the status quo. Explorations of practicing and theorizing for community organizing, activism, reflection, dialogue, and conscientization (cf. Paolo Freire, bell hooks) are encouraged. Please consider a variety of formats beyond papers: workshops, activities, local partnerships, and virtual engagements.
- Minoritization Processes in Engineering Education: There is a critical need for additional work on minoritization processes in engineering education. LEES seeks papers with (but not limited to) the following domains: (1) experiences of people with disabilities, LGBTQ communities, or low-income and first generation students in engineering education and practice; (2) intersectional approaches to identity; (3) discriminatory disciplinary chauvinism such as the categorization of “rigor” or “soft skills” (note that LEES does not condone the usage of this term); (4) the implications of prevailing framings of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ for education research and practice.
- Personal and Institutional Experiences with Integrating Liberal Arts and Engineering: LEES leads efforts to critique and dissolve the artificial boundaries between “social” and “technical” to show that engineering is always a sociotechnical endeavor and that engineers are accountable for understanding how to bridge this “divide.” Please consider building collaborations across ASEE divisions that might support our scholarship and capacity building. Several LEES members noted strong overlaps with, among others: Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering, Ethics, and Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Divisions.
- Global Responsibility of Engineers: Engineering and engineers are implicated in global challenges such as climate change, the energy crisis, and military actions including those in Ukraine that may expand the reach and dominance of the military-industrial-academic complex. These crises have disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities and populations historically neglected and marginalized by engineering “solutions.” What responsibilities do we have as LEES scholars to educate engineers on the role of engineering in these problems, and their responsibilities to address, ameliorate, and mitigate human impacts?
The first step is submission of abstracts for papers, workshops, panels, and special session requests by Oct 31st, 2022. Abstracts should be approximately 300-500 words long and will be peer reviewed. We encourage “nontraditional” papers and panels, and we will work to incorporate these into the peer review system with appropriately chosen reviewers, designate them as special sessions, or otherwise find a strategy of inclusion for the eventual conference. LEES sessions are designed to foster discussion among authors, often functioning like panel discussions of common themes and relevant issues. We have a wealth of incredible work developed by our own members across a spectrum of platforms, some of which can be accessed through conference proceedings and the LEES website.
Information for Authors will be posted by ASEE regarding submission times and uploading instructions. All paper submissions are publish-to-present and will be peer reviewed by the LEES Division process after submission to ASEE’s paper management system. Abstracts and papers are double-blind reviewed. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure that the requirements for double-blind review are met. The abstract and subsequent drafts should NOT include authors’ names or institutional affiliations nor should author names be in the file name or in document properties. It is not necessary to include references in the abstract. Additional information will be shared to the listserv for current members and the LEES website as the year progresses.
To share ideas for panels/workshops or any questions about possible papers, panels, co-sponsoring with other divisions or other special session concepts, or to express interest in serving as a peer reviewer or session moderator, please contact the program chair:
Jenn Rossmann, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Lafayette College, rossmanj@lafayette.edu