Book chapter
Meritocracy, Technocracy, Democracy: Understandings of Racial and Gender Equity in American Engineering Education
International Perspectives on Engineering Education, pp 171-189
2015
Abstract
The idea that technological labor produces both individual security and satisfaction and societal benefits has shaped engineering education in the United States since its inception. Educators and employers have historically cast engineering instruction as a route towards individual and collective uplift for the nation’s citizens. But ideologies of racial, gender, and other categories of difference predicated on identity underlie all such claims and explain the less-than-democratic character of STEM occupations, in which minority citizens, women, LGBT persons and persons with disabilities remain under-represented despite decades-old legal proscriptions against such discrimination. This chapter explores two linked logics that perpetuate this inequitable distribution of opportunities: the technocratic understanding of engineering as an enterprise in which power relations play no part; and the related construction of engineering education as a field based solely on meritocratic judgments about eligibility and skill. Through both of these formulations American engineering supports the ongoing exclusion of certain communities based on perceived heritage and ascriptions of potential in turn based on those identities. This chapter also frames a recent strengthening of these ideologies under emergent neoliberal understandings of market, state, and the agency of individual citizens-as-learners. Finally, given the origins of engineering knowledge and practice in discriminatory social relations, this chapter asks whether improved diversity in engineering would in fact represent a liberatory change.
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74 citations in Scopus
Details
- Title
- Meritocracy, Technocracy, Democracy: Understandings of Racial and Gender Equity in American Engineering Education
- Creators
- Amy E. Slaton - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- International Perspectives on Engineering Education, pp 171-189
- Series
- Philosophy of Engineering and Technology
- Publisher
- Springer International Publishing; Cham
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- History
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85101623857
- Other Identifier
- 991019173879504721