- Co-Editor, Engineering Studies Series, MIT Press (with Matthew Wisnioski)
We live in highly engineered worlds. Engineers play crucial roles in the normative direction of localized knowledge and social orders. The Engineering Studies Series highlights the growing need to understand the situated commitments and practices of engineers and engineering. It asks: what is engineering for? What are engineers for? Drawing from a diverse arena of research, teaching, and outreach, engineering studies raises awareness of how engineers imagine themselves in service to humanity, and how their service ideals impact the defining and solving of problems with multiple ends and variable consequences. It does so by examining relationships among technical and nontechnical dimensions, and how these relationships change over time and from place to place. Its researchers often are critical participants in the practices they study. The Engineering Studies Series publishes research in historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, rhetorical, and organizational studies of engineers and engineering, paying particular attention to normative directionality in engineering epistemologies, practices, identities, and outcomes. Areas of concern include engineering formation, engineering work, engineering design, equity in engineering (gender, racial, ethnic, class, geopolitical), and engineering service to society. The Engineering Studies Series thus pursues three related missions: (1) advance understanding of engineers, engineering, and outcomes of engineering work; (2) help build and serve communities of researchers and learners in engineering studies; and (3) link scholarly work in engineering studies to broader discussions and debates about engineering education, research, practice, policy, and representation.
- Editor, Global Engineering Series, Springer Nature
This series offers learning about engineers, engineering practices, and engineering outcomes
within and across the borders of countries. Readers gain increased abilities to engage forms of engineering knowledge, identities, and commitments that have emerged and traveled across different spaces and times. Engineering students and working engineers learn to better reflect critically on their own knowledge, identities, and commitments in relation to those of other engineering and non-engineering practitioners. Projects in the series often aim to engage variable audiences within and beyond their academic fields, thus helping those fields to expand their reach through practices of knowledge production, expression, and travel.
- Editor emeritus (Editor 2006-2017), Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies , Taylor & Francis
Engineering Studies is an interdisciplinary, international journal devoted to the scholarly study of engineers and engineering. Its mission is threefold: (1) to advance research in historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, rhetorical, and organizational studies of engineers and engineering; (2) to help build and serve diverse communities of researchers interested in engineering studies; and (3) to link scholarly work in engineering studies to broader discussions and debates about engineering education, research, practice, policy, and representation. Engineering Studies is published three times yearly by Taylor & Francis.
- Past-President, Society for Social Studies of Science (2013-2015)
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is an international, nonprofit association founded in 1975 that fosters interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine (a field often referred to as STS). Comprising researchers and practitioners, the field of STS includes Science and Technology Studies; Science, Technology, and Society; and comparable domains of research, teaching, and practice in many languages.
- Co-founder and Co-Organizer (2004-2017) , International Network for Engineering Studies (with Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Maria Paula Diogo, University of Lisbon, and Chyuan-Yuan Wu, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
The International Network for Engineering Studies (INES) was founded in Paris in 2004. INES operates as a collection of overlapping intellectual communities, linked by workshops, conferences, its journal Engineering Studies, and this website. The field of engineering studies is a diverse, interdisciplinary arena of scholarly research and teaching built around the question: What are the relationships among the technical and the nontechnical dimensions of engineering practices, and how do these relationships change over time and from place to place? Addressing and responding to this question can sometimes involve engineering studies researchers as critical participants in the practices they study, including, for example, engineering formation, engineering work, engineering design, equity in engineering (gender, racial, ethnic, class, geopolitical), and engineering service to society. Membership in INES is designed to complement memberships in other professional societies.
- Anchor Teacher, “What is STS for? What are STS scholars for?,” WTMC Summer School (2014) (Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology, and Modern Culture) (with Teun Zuiderent-Jerak & Geert Somsen)
The field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has had many successes critiquing the diffusion model of knowledge. Yet this model, which assumes separate phases of creation, dissemination and utilization, provides a safe haven when STS scholars assess and celebrate their own work. We highlight the production of articles and books for academic audiences and many of us hope our messages travel beyond the boundaries of the field to have consequences, whether modest or profound, among other audiences. The asymmetry is striking: if the practices we analyze turn out to rely on more dynamic models for successful knowledge production and transfer, then why not so for STS? Do STS notions – whether we prefer ‘translation’, ‘(social) construction’, or ‘socially robust knowledge’ – only apply to the fields we study? They don’t. Many STS scholars develop practices that help them to make a difference beyond the field, in both academic and non-academic arenas. Many such practices are crucial to the production of STS knowledge and expertise, yet the community of STS scholars rarely gives them privileged attention. They get bracketed and subordinated rather than empirically unpacked in our writings, discussions, and annual meetings. This Summer School moves these practices to center stage. What can we learn from analyzing what STS scholars do to produce their knowledge and techniques and make these count in public debates, policy practices, scientific controversies, pedagogy, or technology development? To what extent have STS scholars been able to scale up their knowledge? How has this affected practices within STS itself? And how does it affect our understanding of STS as a scholarly discipline? What can we learn from this to address the twin, almost-existential questions that frame this Summer School: What is STS for? What are STS scholars for?