Gary Lee Downey

Ideology and the Clamshell Identity: Organizational Dilemmas in the Anti-Nuclear Power Movement

This ethnographic study examines the role of ideology in the development of organizational dilemmas in the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear protest group active in New England during the late 1970s. In 1977, the Alliance received national recognition for its use of consensus decision making and nonviolent civil disobedience during a highly publicized two-week incarceration following an attempted occupation of the Seabrook nuclear plant. But over the next few years, sharp internal disagreements developed over the use of these strategies, leading ultimately to a factional split. I extend theory from symbolic anthropology to integrate the analysis of ideology into the study of resource mobilization without sacrificing the latters emphasis on rational calculation. My analysis shows that the Alliances anti-nuclear ideology established an egalitarian identity for the group which structured both the initial selection of strategies and later efforts to modify them.

What is engineering studies for? Dominant practices and scalable scholarship

In this article for scholars in engineering studies, I draw on the work of Antonio Gramsci to highlight scaling up as a scholarly practice and make a case that engineering studies highlight attention to what I call scalable scholarship. Scale is the moving boundary between ideas and realities, meaning and reference, the ideal and the real. Highlighting scaling up involves inquiring into what is taking place when scholars not only conduct research on engineers and engineering but also design and teach courses for engineering students, serve on official panels and advisory committees, offer presentations to engineering audiences, and help build a new discipline focused on engineering education. An invitation to deliver a keynote address to the World Congress of Chemical Engineering became a challenge to venture beyond research for STS audiences and pedagogical supplements in the curricular margins to begin contesting the dominant epistemological contents of engineering practices by integrating practices of critical self-analysis in the core of engineering curricula. In undertaking the ‘Glasgow project’, I came to recognize how research practices open and close pathways for critical participation. I also learned the importance of listening to ongoing struggles, following complexity with dense simplicity, engaging diverse audiences, and accepting the necessity and implications of localizing practices. Scalable scholarship avoids the comforts of resolute pessimism, but it risks the dangers of co-optation.

Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress

This paper examines initiatives in engineering formation in the USA as, in part, responses to dominant territorial identities defining what counts as progress. The absence of a primary method of engineering formation during the antebellum period suggests that no metric of progress had yet scaled up to a level of dominance. Robert Thurstons efforts in the 1890s to scale up school‐based formation without liberal education did not fit a country that emphasized high‐volume production at low costs. The attempts of the Wickenden study in the 1920s to achieve coordination did not fit a country highlighting self‐realization through consumption. The 1955 Grinter Report achieved great success when the sudden appearance of Sputnik scaled up a new territorial identity for the USA. Overall, by responding to the evolving metric of low cost, mass use, advocates of engineering formation have designed engineers to serve the country.

Panel — What is global engineering education for?: The making of International Educators

Leading educators who have made risky career commitments to international engineering education have often experienced challenges beyond the boundaries of home countries that made them critical analysts of their work and identities. This panel introduces the unique research process that helped sixteen educators make visible how their goals and motivations extend far beyond the commonly invoked image of global competence as a new skill. Short presentations follow from five contributors to the recently-published What is Global Engineering Education For?: The Making of International Educators. Their accounts of struggles and successes highlight the difficulties in moving international and global engineering education from the margins to the core of engineering curricula. Subsequent open discussion invites commentary from all present about strategies for maximizing the extent to which students gain access to international and global engineering education and genuinely confront and rethink assumptions and career trajectories born in home countries.

Special issue introduction - From region to countries: engineering education in bahrain, egypt, and turkey

rior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, Americans tended to have relatively little interest in the region of the world they understood abstractly as the “Middle East.” Indeed, over the previous three decades, the Middle East had emerged as visible to Americans mainly in news reports about conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians and about potential threats to the supply of oil. Largely ignorant of the peoples and histories making up this part of the world, Americans tended to lump them together with a regional identifier. After September 11, this tendency continued, but with the additional unfortunate feature of connecting the region and the peoples within it to terrorism. Indeed, one effect of the subsequent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been to further cement American attention on the Middle East, as military strategies unfolded in maps that included the Mediterranean Basin, parts of Central Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and to extrapolate from the few to the many. At the same time, the experience of September 11 generated expanded interest among engineering students and engineering faculty in the United States in achieving greater understanding of peoples and issues in the region. For example, students enrolled in an Introduction to Global Issues course taught by one of us, nearly all of whom had been born after the Iranian Revolution and Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979, began raising serious questions about the Middle East, in many cases for the first time in their lives. They moved beyond regional generalizations to inquire into contrasts among people from the region, such as differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and, for one student group, different views of technology held by Muslim engineering students and leaders of a local mosque. Interest in the Middle East also expanded among engineering faculty and administrators. For example, at engineering schools whose oil-related programs have historically attracted students and faculty from the “Middle East” region, admission officers developed strategies to keep their institutions attractive to international students. Student organizations throughout the country sought to create more welcoming environments for those Middle Eastern students who did come. Nationally, university administrators have responded quickly and enthusiastically to funded invitations to build new educational institutions in the P

PDS: Engineering as Problem Definition and Solution

All of us who teach engineers share at least one common problem: the continuing dominance of an image of engineering formation that places highest value on mathematical problem solving in the engineering sciences. The image grounds a claim of jurisdiction over technology through design. This essay offers an alternative image of engineering as problem definition and solution (PDS) and takes initial steps toward facilitating its travel. The analysis outlines four contemporary challenges to the engineering claim of jurisdiction: changes in the work of scientists, mass production of engineers for technical support, credentialing by exam alone, and shared jurisdiction through teamwork. It then explains that PDS avoids incorporating the image of “breadth” because it lacks an organized vision. Four sets of PDS practices include early involvement in problem definition, collaboration with those who define problems differently, assessing alternative implications for stakeholders, and leadership through technical mediation. Three sets of strategies for enabling the PDS image to travel include adapting pedagogies in engineering science courses, adapting pedagogies in peripheral courses, and adapting curricula to produce more than one thing. What might engineers be if a PDS image gained acceptance across the terrains of engineering formation? Could integrating PDS practices into your teaching work for you?

The Local Engineer: Normative Holism in Engineering Formation

Engineering leaders have long tended to equate the technical contents of engineering practices with material advancements across the planet for human benefit. I call this normative holism. Taking normative holism for granted grounds images of engineering practice as knowledge in service. It also frees engineers from assigning themselves responsibility for the actual consequences of their work. Drawing on short vignettes from the territories of France, Germany, and Japan during the late nineteenth century, the approach taken here – the ethnography of dominant images – shows normative holism to be a localized phenomenon. While claiming to produce engineers to work for humanity as a whole, for example, through development, the makers of engineers have actually been following localized pathways that respond to distinct dominant images of material progress. Normative holism is a foundational normativity in engineering formation for two reasons. One is that engineering formation emerges whenever countries first form. The other is that engineers’ ready embrace of normative holism makes it a key site for effectively translating critical analysis into critical participation. If students and working engineers can begin to see and analyze dominant normativities as such, might they be more able and willing to explore additional and alternative normativities?

Engineering and engineering education in egypt

Engineering education in Egypt is a mirror of the countrys history, a result of the confluence of foreign influences (French, British, Swiss, German, Soviet, American) and national desires for sovereignty, development, and Pan-Arabism. American political and economic influence in the most recent period can be seen in the current dominance of the Anglo-Saxon model in engineering education, particularly in such disciplines as electronics, telecommunications, computer engineering, petroleum engineering, biomedical engineering, and aeronautical engineering

Work in progress - developing a rigorous research foundation for graduate programs in engineering education

The current demand is not being met for researchers trained in rigorous, quantitative research. This shortage of educational researchers is critical in the area of engineering education, since very few doctorates in engineering have an education focus, and even fewer have significant assessment content in their educational programs. Previous publications detailed plans to develop coursework in engineering education and discussed the target groups for engineering education degree programs. In this paper, we focus on building a strong research base for engineering education and future program graduates at Virginia Tech. Central to this mission is collaboration across departments and colleges, including but not limited to engineering and education. This was accomplished by leveraging existing research collaborations with a variety of innovative graduate program structures

Engineering Ethics and Engineering Identities: Crossing National Borders

This article describes and accounts for variable interests in engineering ethics in the United States, France, Germany, and Japan by locating recent initiatives in relation to the evolving identities of engineers. A key issue in ethics education for engineers concerns relationships between the identities of engineers and the contents and responsibilities of engineering work. These relationships have varied significantly over time and from country to country around the world. One methodological strategy for sorting out similarities and differences in engineers’ identities is to examine who counts as an engineer, or what makes an engineer. The significant interest in engineering ethics in the United States has been linked to difficulties in adding professional identities to corporate employment. While engineering ethics has attracted little interest in France and formal education in the subject might very well be seen as insulting, German engineering societies have, since the conclusion of World War II, demanded from engineers a strong commitment to social responsibility through technology evaluation and assessment. In Japan, recent flourishing of interest in engineering ethics appears to be linked to concerns that corporations no longer function properly as Japanese “households.” In each case, deliberations over engineering ethics emerge as part of the process through which engineers work to keep their fields in alignment with their changing images of societal advancement.