Many thanks for all your contributions to a wonderful conference this year. To the authors of our 50 papers and the facilitators and panelists in our 7 special sessions, thank you for sharing your work with the LEES community. To our >100 paper reviewers and 15 session moderators, thank you for your vital work in developing LEES scholarship and keeping our technical sessions running smoothly. To those who could not attend this year’s conference due to lost funding, travel restrictions, or other travel-related concerns, your absence was keenly felt. Thank you for your engagement with the division as members, authors, and reviewers, and we hope to see you soon at a future conference.
I would particularly like to thank this year’s distinguished lecturer, Amy Slaton, for her nuanced critique of DEI/EDI initiatives that have never been “a transformative response to racism,” her articulation of the need for historical scholarship in engineering education, and her timely reminder of the importance of “critical mutuality.” We were able to record Amy’s talk:
Huge thanks go also to the organizers and participants in the special session on “Engineering for People and the Planet: Learning from the Ground Up,” which brought together academics, climate justice advocates, and activists for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. We are grateful for this opportunity to connect with local community leaders and activists, and to reflect on how our work is related.
Congratulations to this year’s LEES award winners:
Best Paper: Saskia van Beers, Cindy Rottmann, and Emily Moore, “Illustrating Meritocracy: (How) Do Canadian Engineers See Social Structure?” (this author team are also the winners of the PIC 1 best paper award!)
Best DEI-related paper: Jessica Nhu Tran, Jessica Wolf, and Jillian Seniuk Cicek, “Decolonizing Engineering Curriculum on Stolen Land: Settler Amnesia within Engineering Education”
Sterling Olmsted Award: Joel Alejandro (Alex) Mejia
We are grateful to our partner divisions ECSJ, CED, and ETHICS, and to the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES), for co-hosting our fourth annual cross-divisional social event. We believe this year’s social was our biggest ever turnout! Thanks to our sponsors: INES, the Lafayette College Engineering Division, and the Humanitarian Engineering program at Colorado School of Mines, without whose financial support the social would not be sustainable.
Finally, my enormous gratitude goes out to the LEES leadership team and especially our outgoing Division Chair, Jenn Rossmann, who has expertly led our division for the past two years. Jenn, thank you for your extraordinary service and mentorship! I’m pleased that many from our leadership team will be sticking around for another year, and equally pleased that we’ll be joined by some great new members.
Our incoming team for 2025/26 includes
Division Chair: Marie Stettler Kleine (Colorado School of Mines)
Division Chair Elect: Kari Zacharias (University of Manitoba)
Program Chair: Desen Özkan (University of Connecticut)
Program Co-Chairs Elect: Jenna Tonn (Boston College) and David Tomblin (University of Maryland)
Local Outreach Chair: Avneet Hira (Boston College)
Communications Chair: Rich House (Rose Hulman Institute of Technology)
Social Chair & Treasurer/Secretary: Aubrey Wigner (Colorado School of Mines)
CDEI Liaison: Janet Tsai (University of Colorado Boulder)
It’s been a joy to serve as program chair this year, and I look forward to staying in contact. (Keep an eye on your inbox for upcoming LEES-y opportunities to connect, including this fall’s Engineering and Liberal Education Symposium at Union College!) I wish you all a wonderful summer, and thank you again for bringing your minds and hearts to LEES.
Best,
Kari
Kari Zacharias, PhD (she/her)
24-25 LEES Program Chair
Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division
Call for Papers and Proposals
The Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division invites abstracts for papers and posters, and proposals for full sessions, panel discussions, workshops, and non-traditional session formats for the ASEE Annual Conference, June 22 – 25, 2025 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We especially welcome sessions that highlight local collaborators and engineering practice and engagement in and around Montreal and/or reimagine the traditional conference paper-session. If you would like to propose a non-paper or poster-centered session of any kind, please email the LEES Program Chair, Kari Zacharias, as early as possible. We are excited to work with you on planning, proposing, and reviewing these sessions.
LEES is interested in the role of the humanities, arts, social sciences, and communication in engineering education, and in the role of engineering in broad and relevant liberal education. Engineering processes and products are value-laden; work in LEES calls attention to implicit and explicit values in engineering 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; situating engineering within larger social, historical, political, and cultural contexts; course- and curricular-level integration of engineering and the humanities, arts, and social sciences; and the development, study, and transformation of engineering education programs.
LEES welcomes submissions on any topic pertaining to the broader division goals. For the 2025 conference, we especially encourage work that pertains to the specific themes below. We encourage prospective contributors to consider building collaborations across ASEE divisions that might support our scholarship and capacity building. Past LEES work has had strong overlaps with, among other divisions: Ethics; Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education; and Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering.
Engineering Education for Truth and Reconciliation
We invite submissions that explore engineers’ past and present connections with colonialism, as well as ways that engineering education can support Indigenous sovereignty and actions towards truth and reconciliation. Work in this area may analyze the role of engineering in (re)creating colonial relationships (Nieusma & Riley, 2010), examine engineers’ engagement with Indigenous communities (Ketchum et al., 2023), or critically explore STEM education as a space for reconciliation, decolonization, or Indigenization (Liboiron, 2021; Valle, Slaton, & Riley 2022). We welcome contributions that address colonialism, decolonization, and reconciliation in a wide variety of local contexts, including but not limited to American and Canadian settler colonialism and the many Indigenous cultures of Turtle Island (North America).
Engineering and Conflict
Engineers have long played significant roles in global politics, war, and revolution, but the field of engineering education has shown reluctance to confront its own involvement: “to write of politics, activism, or past events is not to engage in any familiar way with engineering epistemics” (Slaton & Vakil, 2024). We invite contributions that contravene this norm by examining relationships between engineering and conflict, both in the literal sense of engineers’ involvement in war, protest, labor disputes, etc. (Nieusma & Blue, 2012; Riley & Lambrinidou, 2015; Wisnioski, 2012) and as an analytical category that can be applied to teaching and/or research in engineering education (Tonn & Hira, 2024). In the context of ongoing geopolitical conflicts, rights violations, and anti-DEI legislative efforts, how might engineering education prepare students for conversations, considerations, and choices that acknowledge and address conflict?
Engineering and Climate Change
We invite submissions that focus on engineering values and practices pertaining to energy transition, decarbonization, and sustainability broadly. While engineering has contributed to climate change, it has also hidden the evidence (Oreskes & Conway, 2011) and dodged or denied responsibility (Pawley, 2019). With states’ increased attention to justice in energy transition and environmental racism (Heffron, 2022; Sovacool, 2021), we ask, how might engineering education prepare students to participate in complicated, global, and local sociotechnical transitions for climate change mitigation?
Sociotechnical Integration in Engineering Education:
LEES leads efforts to critique and dissolve the artificial boundaries between “social” and “technical” to show that engineering is always a sociotechnical endeavor. LEES work holds engineers accountable for understanding how to bridge the socio-technical “divide,” and minimizing discriminatory disciplinary chauvinism (Reddy et al., 2023; Bairaktarova & Pilotte, 2020; Smith & Smith, 2018; Carrigan & Bardini, 2021). This work may be done on a variety of scales, from the personal to the cross-institutional. We especially welcome submissions that recognize, analyze, and otherwise engage with a “generative tension” among LEES participants, a group that serves as a venue for engineering educators grounded in science and technology studies and/or engineering studies and also makes space for liberal arts education program building which includes promoting the importance of communication and professional skills, etc (Nieusma, 2015).
We will also work to incorporate a wide variety of other formats into the peer review system, designate them as special sessions, or otherwise find ways to include this work in the conference. We plan to repeat the special session format on teaching case studies that LEES hosted at the 2024 conference. Please stay tuned for more information about submissions to this session! If your proposal does not fit comfortably into the submission options available through Nemo, please email LEES Program Chair Kari Zacharias to initiate the submission and review process.
