Title: Using power, privilege, and intersectionality to understand, disrupt, and dismantle oppressive structures within academia: A design case
Many of us are working to create a more inclusive and socially just culture within engineering education and engineering. Despite significant effort, marginalization and discrimination continue, buoyed by systems of oppression. How can we disrupt and dismantle oppressive systems in engineering education? In our work, we explore how power and privilege are enacted within leadership teams that aim to create revolutionary changes within engineering departments. Based on this work, we developed the POWER protocol (Privilege and Oppression: Working for Equitable Recourse), a workshop that guides engineering educators to identify and understand the intersectional nature of power and privilege before planning strategies to disrupt, disarm, and dismantle it. In this paper, we present a design case to show how this workshop has evolved. We provide the POWER protocol in the appendix so that others can adapt this workshop for their own contexts. In the interactive session at CoNECD, we will take attendees through part of the POWER protocol (we will scope the workshop to fit in the time allotted; the full workshop is 1.5 hours) to examine how power, privilege, and intersectionality can help attendees frame their experiences and begin to understand how their everyday experiences may be influenced by systemic oppression. To guide this process, we orient around the question: How can we become aware of power and privilege on collaborative academic teams in order to better affect social change and improve interdisciplinary and cross-identity/boundary interactions, communication, and inclusivity? We hope that through interactive sessions such as this that we can all become more persistent and sophisticated in our efforts to dismantle some of these forms of power and privilege within the university, especially those aspects that continue to oppress and oftentimes push marginalized people and perspectives out of academia. Our interactive approach will position attendees to bring this protocol back to their institutions and adapt it to their own contexts. In the tradition of the design case such as those published by the International Journal of Designs for Learning, we detail how our contexts and the literature informed the iterative development of the POWER protocol in this paper. We provide a vivid account of the POWER protocol and a facilitation guide that others can use and adapt in their own contexts. Using a narrative format, we share a forthright account of our development process. Design cases are valuable in highlighting distinctive aspects of how a design came to be; by sharing our design decisions along with the design, others may gain insight into both what has made our design successful, and where it may be brittle when used in new contexts. Finally, we describe how we will engage attendees in the CoNECD session. more »« less
We (the facilitators) work as social scientists and engineering education researchers from different universities on the NSF-supported program, Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) ( https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2017/nsf17501/nsf17501.htm ). We began to notice how power and privilege were enacted on our teams, which consisted of diverse team members (e.g., diverse in disciplinary affiliation, role in the university, gender, race, LGBTQIA+ status). This motivated a research project and workshops/special sessions such as the one proposed here, where we explore how power and privilege are enacted within interdisciplinary teams so that we can begin to dismantle systemic oppressions within academia [1] , [2] . The POWER special session (Privilege and Oppression: Working for Equitable Recourse) was developed to guide engineering educators to identify and understand the intersectional nature of power and privilege before planning strategies to disrupt, disarm, and dismantle it.
In June 2020, at the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), which was held entirely online due to the impacts of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), engineering education researchers and social justice scholars diagnosed the spread of two diseases in the United States: COVID-19 and racism. During a virtual workshop (T614A) titled, “Using Power, Privilege, and Intersectionality as Lenses to Understand our Experiences and Begin to Disrupt and Dismantle Oppressive Structures Within Academia,” Drs. Nadia Kellam, Vanessa Svihla, Donna Riley, Alice Pawley, Kelly Cross, Susannah Davis, and Jay Pembridge presented what we might call a pathological analysis of institutionalized racism and various other “isms.” In order to address the intersecting impacts of this double pandemic, they prescribed counter practices and protocols of anti-racism, and strategies against other oppressive “isms” in academia. At the beginning of the virtual workshop, the presenters were pleasantly surprised to see that they had around a hundred attendees. Did the online format of the ASEE conference afford broader exposure of the workshop? Did recent uprising of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the country, and internationally, generate broader interest in their topic? Whatever the case, at a time when an in-person conference could not be convened without compromising public health safety, ASEE’s virtual conference platform, furnished by Pathable and supplemented by Zoom, made possible the broader social impacts of Dr. Svihla’s land acknowledgement of the unceded Indigenous lands from which she was presenting. Svihla attempted to go beyond a hollow gesture by including a hyperlink in her slides to a COVID-19 relief fund for the Navajo Nation, and encouraged attendees to make a donation as they copied and pasted the link in the Zoom Chat. Dr. Cross’s statement that you are either a racist or an anti-racist at this point also promised broader social impacts in the context of the virtual workshop. You could feel the intensity of the BLM social movements and the broader political climate in the tone of the presenters’ voices. The mobilizing masses on the streets resonated with a cutting-edge of social justice research and education at the ASEE virtual conference. COVID-19 has both exacerbated and made more obvious the unevenness and inequities in our educational practices, processes, and infrastructures. This paper is an extension of a broader collaborative research project that accounts for how an exceptional group of engineering educators have taken this opportunity to socially broaden their curricula to include not just public health matters, but also contemporary political and social movements. Engineering educators for change and advocates for social justice quickly recognized the affordances of diverse forms of digital technologies, and the possibilities of broadening their impact through educational practices and infrastructures of inclusion, openness, and accessibility. They are makers of what Gary Downy calls “scalable scholarship”—projects in support of marginalized epistemologies that can be scaled up from ideation to practice in ways that unsettle and displace the dominant epistemological paradigm of engineering education.[1] This paper is a work in progress. It marks the beginning of a much lengthier project that documents the key positionality of engineering educators for change, and how they are socially situated in places where they can connect social movements with industrial transitions, and participate in the production of “undone sciences” that address “a structured absence that emerges from relations of inequality.”[2] In this paper, we offer a brief glimpse into ethnographic data we collected virtually through interviews, participant observation, and digital archiving from March 2019 to August 2019, during the initial impacts of COVID-19 in the United States. The collaborative research that undergirds this paper is ongoing, and what is presented here is a rough and early articulation of ideas and research findings that have begun to emerge through our engagement with engineering educators for change. This paper begins by introducing an image concept that will guide our analysis of how, in this historical moment, forms of social and racial justice are finding their way into the practices of engineering educators through slight changes in pedagogical techniques in response the debilitating impacts of the pandemic. Conceptually, we are interested in how small and subtle changes in learning conditions can socially broaden the impact of engineering educators for change. After introducing the image concept that guides this work, we will briefly discuss methodology and offer background information about the project. Next, we discuss literature that revolves around the question, what is engineering education for? Finally, we introduce the notion of situating engineering education and give readers a brief glimpse into our ethnographic data. The conclusion will indicate future directions for writing, research, and intervention.
Fraune, Marlena R.; Leite, Iolanda; Karatas, Nihan; Amirova, Aida; Legeleux, Amélie; Sandygulova, Anara; Neerincx, Anouk; Dilip Tikas, Gaurav; Gunes, Hatice; Mohan, Mayumi; et al
(, Frontiers in Robotics and AI)
The field of human-robot interaction (HRI) research is multidisciplinary and requires researchers to understand diverse fields including computer science, engineering, informatics, philosophy, psychology, and more disciplines. However, it is hard to be an expert in everything. To help HRI researchers develop methodological skills, especially in areas that are relatively new to them, we conducted a virtual workshop, Workshop Your Study Design (WYSD), at the 2021 International Conference on HRI. In this workshop, we grouped participants with mentors, who are experts in areas like real-world studies, empirical lab studies, questionnaire design, interview, participatory design, and statistics. During and after the workshop, participants discussed their proposed study methods, obtained feedback, and improved their work accordingly. In this paper, we present 1) Workshop attendees’ feedback about the workshop and 2) Lessons that the participants learned during their discussions with mentors. Participants’ responses about the workshop were positive, and future scholars who wish to run such a workshop can consider implementing their suggestions. The main contribution of this paper is the lessons learned section, where the workshop participants contributed to forming this section based on what participants discovered during the workshop. We organize lessons learned into themes of 1) Improving study design for HRI, 2) How to work with participants - especially children -, 3) Making the most of the study and robot’s limitations, and 4) How to collaborate well across fields as they were the areas of the papers submitted to the workshop. These themes include practical tips and guidelines to assist researchers to learn about fields of HRI research with which they have limited experience. We include specific examples, and researchers can adapt the tips and guidelines to their own areas to avoid some common mistakes and pitfalls in their research.
Hanasono, Lisa Kiyomi; Ro, Hyun Kyoung; O’Neil, Deborah A.; Broido, Ellen M.; Yacobucci, Margaret Mary; Peña, Susana; Root, Karen V.
(, Communication Quarterly)
As individuals who use their privilege to reduce prejudice, educate others about social justice, and actively stop discrimination, faculty allies can play a vital role in transforming universities to be more equitable, diverse, and inclusive. However, discrepancies persist in how faculty define privilege and communicate allyship. Drawing from standpoint theory, we examined discursive divergences in how 105 full-time faculty defined and experienced privilege and how they enacted allyship in the workplace. Participants tended to conceptualize privilege as a set of advantages and lack of structural barriers for people based on their group membership(s). Discursive differences emerged regarding the degree to which faculty participants perceived privilege to be un/earned and rooted in structural power, and some participants took ownership of their social privilege while others discursively elided it. When asked to identify specific ally actions, participants often described broad behaviors that aimed to help individuals in interpersonal contexts but did not address actions aimed at dismantling inequitable power structures, revising biased policies, and transforming toxic organizational cultures. Our findings highlight the need for trainings that clarify conceptualizations of privilege and help faculty translate their understanding of allyship into communicative actions that stop discrimination at interpersonal and institutional levels.
Matthews, Suzanne J.; Adams, Joel C.; Brown, Richard A.; Shoop, Elizabeth
(, Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’19))
The ACM/IEEE CS 2013 report recommends fifteen hours of parallel & distributed computing (PDC) education for every undergraduate. This workshop illustrates the use of the Raspberry Pi as an inexpensive, multicore platform for teaching shared-memory parallel programming. The inexpensive and tactile nature of the Raspberry Pi enables each student to experience her own parallel multiprocessor through sight and touch. In this hands-on workshop, we will teach attendees how they can leverage the Raspberry Pi and the OpenMP library to teach shared-memory parallel concepts in their own classrooms. All CS educators who are interested in learning about the Raspberry Pi, shared memory parallelism, and OpenMP are encouraged to attend. In Part I of the workshop, each participant will connect to and learn about the Raspberry Pi's multicore capabilities. In Part II, each participant will engage in self-paced, hands-on exploration of basic parallel computing concepts using the OpenMP "patternlets" from CSinParallel.org. In Part III, participants will investigate more complex applications, such as numeric integration and drug design and study how these applications can be parallelized using OpenMP. We will conclude the workshop with a series of lightning talks discussing how the Raspberry Pi has been used to teach parallel computing concepts at different institutions. We will also present a summary of student perceptions of the Raspberry Pi. All materials from this workshop will be freely available from CSinParallel.org. Space is limited to 20 participants. A laptop is required.
Kellam, Nadia, Svihla, Vanessa, Davis, Susannah C., Sajadi, Susan, and Desiderio, Jasmine. Using power, privilege, and intersectionality to understand, disrupt, and dismantle oppressive structures within academia: A design case. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10215732. CoNECD Conference .
Kellam, Nadia, Svihla, Vanessa, Davis, Susannah C., Sajadi, Susan, & Desiderio, Jasmine. Using power, privilege, and intersectionality to understand, disrupt, and dismantle oppressive structures within academia: A design case. CoNECD Conference, (). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10215732.
Kellam, Nadia, Svihla, Vanessa, Davis, Susannah C., Sajadi, Susan, and Desiderio, Jasmine.
"Using power, privilege, and intersectionality to understand, disrupt, and dismantle oppressive structures within academia: A design case". CoNECD Conference (). Country unknown/Code not available. https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10215732.
@article{osti_10215732,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Using power, privilege, and intersectionality to understand, disrupt, and dismantle oppressive structures within academia: A design case},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10215732},
abstractNote = {Many of us are working to create a more inclusive and socially just culture within engineering education and engineering. Despite significant effort, marginalization and discrimination continue, buoyed by systems of oppression. How can we disrupt and dismantle oppressive systems in engineering education? In our work, we explore how power and privilege are enacted within leadership teams that aim to create revolutionary changes within engineering departments. Based on this work, we developed the POWER protocol (Privilege and Oppression: Working for Equitable Recourse), a workshop that guides engineering educators to identify and understand the intersectional nature of power and privilege before planning strategies to disrupt, disarm, and dismantle it. In this paper, we present a design case to show how this workshop has evolved. We provide the POWER protocol in the appendix so that others can adapt this workshop for their own contexts. In the interactive session at CoNECD, we will take attendees through part of the POWER protocol (we will scope the workshop to fit in the time allotted; the full workshop is 1.5 hours) to examine how power, privilege, and intersectionality can help attendees frame their experiences and begin to understand how their everyday experiences may be influenced by systemic oppression. To guide this process, we orient around the question: How can we become aware of power and privilege on collaborative academic teams in order to better affect social change and improve interdisciplinary and cross-identity/boundary interactions, communication, and inclusivity? We hope that through interactive sessions such as this that we can all become more persistent and sophisticated in our efforts to dismantle some of these forms of power and privilege within the university, especially those aspects that continue to oppress and oftentimes push marginalized people and perspectives out of academia. Our interactive approach will position attendees to bring this protocol back to their institutions and adapt it to their own contexts. In the tradition of the design case such as those published by the International Journal of Designs for Learning, we detail how our contexts and the literature informed the iterative development of the POWER protocol in this paper. We provide a vivid account of the POWER protocol and a facilitation guide that others can use and adapt in their own contexts. Using a narrative format, we share a forthright account of our development process. Design cases are valuable in highlighting distinctive aspects of how a design came to be; by sharing our design decisions along with the design, others may gain insight into both what has made our design successful, and where it may be brittle when used in new contexts. Finally, we describe how we will engage attendees in the CoNECD session.},
journal = {CoNECD Conference},
author = {Kellam, Nadia and Svihla, Vanessa and Davis, Susannah C. and Sajadi, Susan and Desiderio, Jasmine},
editor = {null}
}
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