Logo image
Back
Note to Self: Save Humanity (A Social and Cultural History of the "Grand Challenges")
Conference proceeding   Open access

Note to Self: Save Humanity (A Social and Cultural History of the "Grand Challenges")

Amy Slaton
2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, pp 22.1104.1-22.1104.15
26 Jun 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--18812
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
url
https://peer.asee.org/note-to-self-save-humanity-a-social-and-cultural-history-of-the-grand-challengesView
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Open Access (License Unspecified),  Open

Abstract

Bicycles Developing countries Engineering research Engineering societies Engineers Historians LDCs Lists Organizations Product development Road maintenance Uplift Walking Engineering Ethics Infrastructure Sustainability
The Grand Challenges lately developed by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE, 2010)enter a long historical tradition of such epically scaled "to-do" lists. As early as the 1850s, as the first formal organizations of American engineers took shape, the individuals involved sought to project long-term goals and professional guidelines for their groups. The mission statements,codes of ethics, and, later, lists of so-called grand challenges that have issued from engineering societies have served the dual function of directing engineers' work and supporting particular cultural roles for these bodies of experts. Almost all such plans, regardless of period or sponsoring body, have also blended highly practical aims of industrial and infrastructural development and more inchoate projects of societal uplift. The Grand Challenges of the NAE,currently playing a formative role in many engineering organizations and research and teaching settings, extend this lineage. Their integration of economic and productive goals with explicit ideals of social and cultural welfare derives from historical precedents described in this paper.Significantly, the NAE’s Grand Challenges, as was the case with earlier examples of such lists,forward some ideas of human betterment and not others in their program of “driving the advance of human civilization.” We might bring to the Grand Challenges the type of critical, politically informed analysis that historians have brought to other sites of engineering activity and professionalization, to detect the nature of interests that underlay all such projections of engineering’s role in society. If we no longer assume that American and European engineers can best plan the civil infrastructures of developing nations, or that men are better suited for technical leadership roles than women, as the ethical codes of western engineering societies once claimed,we may also ask what priorities and social inequities remain unexamined in today’s mission statements. For example, in the Grand Challenges, roadway maintenance is granted equivalence with the engineering of bicycle and walking infrastructure rather than subordinated to those more environmentally sustainable alternatives (“Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure”). The genetic engineering of “personalized medicine” is presumed to carry no insurmountable risks to patient privacy, yet the current political influence of insurers who might profit from patients’ genetic data is not addressed (“Engineer Better Medicines”). Most fundamentally, the Grand Challenges proceed from the premise that engineering research,construction, invention, and production are to take precedence over their absence, as befits a body dedicated not to the contraction of such enterprises but to their extension. Yet the interests of sustainability, global health, and other areas of human well-being might be best served in certain cases by just such a turning away from engineering. By making explicit the social and historical assumptions of the NAE’s Grand Challenges, and probing the implications of those assumptions for a diverse range of actors and communities, we may pave the way for more thoughtful engagement with the humanistic and democratic potential of engineering.

Metrics

17 Record Views

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#13 Climate Action
#4 Quality Education
#9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
#12 Responsible Consumption & Production

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Web of Science research areas
Education & Educational Research
Education, Scientific Disciplines
Engineering, Multidisciplinary
Logo image