Bringing in "The Social" : Resisting and Assisting Social Engagement in Engineering Education

This paper explores how students experience the integration of social knowledge into engineering education. Engineering for peace requires going beyond purely technical engineering towards an integrated social and technical understanding of how engineering can promote community development and societal good. This study focuses on student experiences at two major engineering for community development programs that are actively integrating social and technical knowledge in engineering education, with the goal of training more socially-engaged engineers. We find that knowledge of the social context and implications of engineering creates tensions and conflicts with established technocentric norms of engineering knowledge and practice. This makes the adoption and integration of these concepts challenging for students engaged in these fields. We conclude that integration of "the social" requires more than shifts in educational content and is also reliant on changes in engineering culture and student support both inside and outside of the classroom in order to challenge normative, technocentric conceptions of engineering identity, knowledge, and practice. This has important implications for peace engineering, because understanding how students are integrating knowledge of "the social" in engineering education is key to the development and support of future peace engineers.