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1. From transactional to transformative: evolving research practices through mutual aid collaboration

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2025.100767  

   Bollempalli, Manasa; Fatema, Nuzhat; Bass, Kevin; Adams, Anthony; Dadson, Yvonne Appiah; Gilmore, Elisabeth; Bennett-Gayle, DeeDee; Li, Amy; Ramenzoni, Victoria (November 2025, Climate Risk Management)

   While equity in climate adaptation is increasingly recognized, university-based research can inadvertently reinforce inequities. This paper examines a partnership between Homies Helping Homies, a South Philadelphia mutual aid organization, and university researchers to document climate impacts on low-income and marginalized communities. Inequities often arise when research fails to engage communities, overlooks relevant concerns, lacks trust, or misinterprets responses due to insufficient cultural understanding. Mutual aid organizations, inherently community-based, foster resilience and solidarity, addressing unmet needs while building collective trust. Anchored in Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), we adopt a reflexive, co-produced approach that foregrounds positionality, reciprocity, and shared decision-making. This approach transformed the researcher-community relationships, leveled hierarchies, and addressed the gaps in familiarity among researchers and other actors. By centering everyday experiences of heat, flooding, and resource scarcity, the collaboration revealed how local knowledge and trust networks shape risk perception and adaptive behavior. The case demonstrates how mutual aid organizations can serve as both community resilience infrastructure and methodological partners in producing usable, justice-oriented climate knowledge. We argue that embedding research within reciprocal, care-centered relationships enhances the legitimacy, ethics, and transformative potential of climate risk management, particularly in urban contexts marked by systemic inequity. 

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2. Developing a Model of Professional Agency Toward Change in Engineering Education for Early Career Scholars

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34416  

   Faber, Courtney; Lee, Walter; Strong, Alexandra; Bodnar, Cheryl; Smith-Orr, Courtney; McCave, Erin (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   As the field of engineering education continues to evolve, the number of early career scholars who identify as members of the discipline will continue to increase. These engineering education scholars will need to take strategic and intentional actions towards their professional goals and the goals of the engineering education community to be impactful within their positions. In other words, they must exercise agency. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to investigate how the agency of early career, engineering education scholars manifests across different contexts. Our overarching research question is: How do institutional, individual, and disciplinary field and societal features influence early career engineering education faculty member’s agency to impact engineering education in their particular positions? To investigate how faculty agency manifests across different contexts, we adopted a longitudinal research approach to focus on our own experiences as engineering education scholars. Due to the complexity of the phenomenon, more common approaches to qualitative research (e.g., interviews, surveys, etc.) were unlikely to illuminate the manifestation of agency, which requires capturing the nuances associated with one’s day-to-day experiences. Thus, to address our research purpose, we required a research design that provided a space to explore one’s acceptance of ambiguity, responses to disappointments, willingness to adapt, process of adapting, and experiences with collaboration. The poster presented will provide a preliminary version of the model along with a detailed description of the methods used to develop it. In short, we integrated collaborative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography as a means for building our model. Autoethnography is a research approach that critically examines personal experience to explore a cultural phenomenon. Collaborative autoethnography, which leverages collective sense-making of the data, informed the structure of our data collection. Specifically, we documented our individual experiences over the course of six semesters by (1) completing weekly, monthly, pre-semester, and post-semester reflection questions; (2) participating in periodic activities and discussions focused on targeted areas of our theoretical framework and relevant literature; and (3) discussing the outcomes from both (1) and (2) in weekly meetings. Collaborative inquiry, in contrast to collaborative autoethnography, is a research approach where people pair reflection on practice with action through multiple inquiry cycles. Collaborative inquiry guided the topics of discussion within our weekly meetings and how we approached challenges and other aspects of our positions. The combination of these methodologies allowed us to deeply and systematically explore our own experiences, allowing us to develop a model of professional agency towards change in engineering education through collaborative sense-making. By sharing our findings with current and developing engineering education graduate programs, we will enable them to make programmatic changes to benefit current and future engineering education scholars. These findings also will provide a mechanism for divisions within ASEE to develop programming and resources to support the sustained success and impact of their members. 

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3. Engineers as Problem‐Solvers for Sustainable Development?—Exploring Students' Learning Outcomes from Sustainability and Human Rights‐Centered Approaches in Engineering Education

   https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70137  

   Lee, Minju; Chacón‐Hurtado, Davis; Hertel, Shareen (June 2025, European Journal of Education)

   This paper examines the impact of a human rights framework in engineering education on students' perceptions of sustainability and human rights. Recently, scholars have emphasised the need to develop a new engineering pedagogy and an ethical framework for the workforce. This emphasis arises from the fact that, as the engineering workforce has become multicultural and globalised, prospective engineers require new ideas, technologies, perspectives and professional ethics to adapt to the changing world. In this context, scholars have primarily focused on creating sustainable approaches that highlight the coexistence between humans and nature, along with equity, diversity and human dignity, while also developing educational strategies to challenge the conventional notion of engineers as problem‐solvers. The University of Connecticut (UConn) has developed a curriculum that equips students with the core concepts and methodological tools essential for understanding the socially and environmentally responsive roles of engineers and their solutions. This paper examines learning outcomes in an existing course within this curriculum, ‘Engineering for Human Rights’, by analysing original, anonymized exit survey data and anonymized SET evaluations from enrolled students. We also assess the instructors' reflections on the class. The findings of our research contribute to broader discussions of innovation in engineering pedagogy. 

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4. Combining Text‐Based Institutional Network and Cost–Benefit Methods to Advance Policy Design Analysis: An Illustrative Application to Nonprofit Open‐Source Software Incubation

   https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70061  

   Virgüez‐Ruiz, Santiago; Atkisson, Curtis; Bushouse, Brenda; Schweik, Charles (August 2025, Policy Studies Journal)

   ABSTRACT Institutional arrangements that guide collective action between entities create benefits and burdens for collaborating entities and can encourage cooperation or create coordination dilemmas. There is an abundance of research in public policy, public administration, and nonprofit management on cross‐sector alliances, co‐production, and collaborative networks. We contribute to advancing this research by introducing a methodological approach that combines two text‐based methods: institutional network analysis and cost–benefit analysis. We utilize the Institutional Grammar to code policy documents that govern relationships between actors. The coded text is then used to identify Networks of Prescribed Interactions to analyze institutional relationships between policy actors. We then utilize the coded text in a cost–benefit analysis to assess benefit and burden distributive effects. This integrated methodological framework provides researchers with a tool to elucidate both the institutional patterns of interaction and distributive implications embedded in policy documents, revealing insights that single‐method approaches cannot capture. We then utilize the coded text in a cost–benefit analysis to assess benefit and burden distributive effects. This integrated methodological framework provides researchers with a tool to elucidate both the institutional patterns of interaction and distributive implications embedded in policy documents, revealing insights that single‐method approaches cannot capture. To demonstrate the utility of this integrated approach, we examine the policy design of two nonprofit open‐source software (OSS) incubation programs with contrasting characteristics: the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). We select these cases because: (1) they are co‐production alliances and have policy documents that articulate support for collective action; (2) their policy documents and group discussions are open access, creating an opportunity to advance text‐based policy analysis methods; and (3) they represent juxtaposed examples of high and low risk for collaboration settings, thereby providing two illustrative cases of the combined network and cost–benefit text‐based methodological approach. The network analysis finds that ASF policies, as a high‐risk setting, emphasize bonding structures, particularly higher reciprocity, which creates a context for cooperation. OSGeo, a low‐risk setting, has policies creating a context for bridging structures, evident in high brokerage efficiency, to facilitate coordination. The cost–benefit analysis finds that ASF policies balance the distribution of costs and benefits between ASF and projects, while in OSGeo, projects bear both costs and benefits. These findings demonstrate that the combination of network and cost–benefit analysis is an effective tool for utilizing text to compare policy designs. 

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5. How Community-Driven Design Research Endures When the World is on Fire

   Litts, B.K. (January 2021, Proceedings of 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences)

   de Vries, E. (Ed.)

   Scholars have called for equity-oriented, community-centered approaches to STEM related research and design to help address the persistent disparities and inequities in these fields. In response to this need, we explore a community-driven design research approach, a collaborative research process in which Indigenous partners maintain sovereignty. As a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, researchers, and designers, we present our thinking in-progress of how we have engaged the initial phases of our community-driven research and endured in the midst of global pandemic and unrest in 2020. Findings capture a snapshot of our ongoing insights for effective strategies to engage and sustain community-driven design research as a critical methodological approach. 

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