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The 2024 SEFI conference posed the question, “How can we ensure the highest quality of technical competence while at the same time ensuring that social and environmental responsibility is core to the identity of engineering graduates?” Identity formation is a complex process that has been theorized in many ways. In this workshop, I invited participants to consider Holland and colleagues’ theory of identity as a useful framework for reflecting on our how our participation in engineering education contributes to beliefs about what makes a “real” or the “best” engineer. This theory posits that within our classrooms, students are participating in a complex cultural practice through which they ultimately learn to identify (and be identified) as more or less of an engineer than others. Our everyday classroom practices ultimately function to co-construct 1) shared beliefs about what makes a “good” engineer, and 2) everyone’s relative position in a social hierarchy. Furthermore, identify development is theorized to include both social forces (i.e., rules and guidelines that influence how people behave in a social space) and individual agency (i.e., we are not just carbon copies of culture or norms because our actions shape the culture and norms). Understanding identity development as such empowers us to be intentional with our own participation in identity construction by providing theoretical entry points for conveying the value of social responsibility. The usefulness of this particular identity theory to ideate strategies for integrating social responsibility into students’ engineering identities has been corroborated by the empirical findings of our U.S.-based engineering education research. During this workshop, we utilized the theory to draw out existing or future concrete practices that each of us, given our unique global and institutional contexts, are motivated to enact in support of social responsibility as core to engineering. Specifically, our interactions culminated with answering the following question: What is one concrete way I can be intentional in how I participate in identity co-construction? Participant responses to this prompt are presented directly.
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Privacy Nicks: How the Law Normalizes Surveillance
Privacy law is failing to protect individuals from being watched and exposed, despite stronger surveillance and data protection rules. The problem is that our rules look to social norms to set thresholds for privacy violations, but people can get used to being observed. In this Article, we argue that by ignoring de minimis privacy encroachments, the law is complicit in normalizing surveillance. Privacy law helps acclimate people to being watched by ignoring smaller, more frequent, and more mundane privacy diminutions. We call these reductions “privacy nicks,” like the proverbial “thousand cuts” that lead to death. Privacy nicks come from the proliferation of cameras and biometric sensors on doorbells, glasses, and watches, and the drift of surveillance and data analytics into new areas of our lives like travel, exercise, and social gatherings. Under our theory of privacy nicks as the Achilles heel of surveillance law, invasive practices become routine through repeated exposures that acclimate us to being vulnerable and watched in increasingly intimate ways. With acclimation comes resignation, and this shift in attitude biases how citizens and lawmakers view reasonable measures and fair tradeoffs. Because the law looks to norms and people’s expectations to set thresholds for what counts as a privacy violation, the normalization of these nicks results in a constant renegotiation of privacy standards to society’s disadvantage. When this happens, the legal and social threshold for rejecting invasive new practices keeps getting redrawn, excusing ever more aggressive intrusions. In effect, the test of what privacy law allows is whatever people will tolerate. There is no rule to stop us from tolerating everything. This Article provides a new theory and terminology to understand where privacy law falls short and suggests a way to escape the current surveillance spiral.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1956393
- PAR ID:
- 10638372
- Publisher / Repository:
- Washington University Law Review
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Washington University Law Review
- ISSN:
- 2166-8000
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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