From feminist hacker meetups to engineering educators: Implications of social movements in technology for change-making at the level of higher education

Abstract

This paper shares nascent research on the organizing practices of feminist technology activists and open science hardware (OSH) developers who are concerned with how technologies (and subsequent knowledges about them) are defined, framed, further developed, shared, and in turn shape the worlds in which we live. They intend to bring a frame of reflexivity toward awareness of the politics imbued in technology as well as the often exclusionary cultures entangled therein. Further this research brings field work observations of these groups and their practices (designated as Study 1) into conversation with interviews of engineering education researchers (designated as Study 2). In that vein, this examination asks: What might an analysis of the practices and mindsets of feminist hacker and opensource science hardware groups contribute to the world of engineering education, specifically for educators interested in change-making strategies for creating a more equitable higher education environment that takes on issues of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.? With a theoretical grounding in the work of Myles Horton and the Highlander Research and Education Center's theory of change, bell hooks' liberatory pedagogies, and social movement theory from a science and technology studies (STS) perspective, this paper aims to examine how current social movements in technology, specifically the organizing work of feminist hacker and tech collectives as well as those working with opensource science hardware, might inform changes to engineering practice via educational reform. Data collection for this work involves participant observation from four different meetings and discursive analysis of websites and promotional materials. The result is a multi-modal analysis which will then be brought into conversation with previous work on 32 interviews with engineering education practitioners who have identified issues in the discipline and are interested in enacting change in the higher institutional setting. Such work has implications for engineering education reform and organizing possibilities toward enabling educators to seed the changes they seek.