Political Imagination, Responsibility, and Ethics in Engineering Students' Discussions of Drone Surveillance and Warfare

• In Event: Ethics, STEM, and the Possibilities and Limitations of Transformation in Capitalist, Militarist Democracies

Abstract

Objective/Purpose: The professional work of engineers profoundly affects the social, economic, and political landscape of society at local to global scales (Bucciarelli, 2008). But engineers often accept the status quo, hesitate to re-imagine political possibilities, and do not deeply interrogate the contexts that shape their work or the responsibilities that arise from engineering design and production (Winner, 1990). Given these tendencies, it is important for engineers to better engage with the perspectives of different stakeholders, far and near, who are impacted by their work. In this paper, we explore the possibilities and limitations that emerge when engineering college students engage with the perspectives of different interested parties in the context of a socio-scientific issue.

Theoretical Framework: Previous research has largely characterized students’ ability to evaluate knowledge from multiple perspectives through a cognitivist lens (King & Kitchener, 2002; Zeidler, Sadler, Applebaum, & Callahan, 2009). Here, we present an alternative account in which perspectives that are taken up by engineering students in the context of an ethics course is entangled with aspects of their identities, emotions, and ideologies, as well as the dynamics of the unfolding interactions between participants.

Data/Methods: Our data consists of video records of a two hour class discussion in a sophomore/junior level course on engineering ethics for electrical engineering majors (16 students). The discussion focused on benefits and negative effects of the use of autonomous drones. Our analysis draws on analytical tools from knowledge analysis (Parnafes & diSessa, 2013) and interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Drawing from these frameworks, we attend to students’ utterances and gestures, posture, tone, and prosody to examine meaning that is constructed in interaction.

Findings: Our analysis elucidates the relationship between “political imagination” and ethical sense making by engineering students. Deeply intertwined with differing emotional attachments to the security of nation-states and the well-being of their residents, as well as varying stances of empathy toward multiple stakeholders, the students constructed two starkly different narratives about the ethics of drone warfare. The most dominant narrative reflected the ways in which U.S. interests and casualties are represented in the U.S. media. The second narrative, notably came from two non-American students in the class. It attempted to humanize the experiences of the victims of drone warfare and questioned taken-for-granted assumptions in the first narrative concerning security, the value of different types of human lives, and the causes of international conflict. The contextual nature of ethical sense making was apparent in how students who articulated the first narrative invoked distinct interpretative assumptions and frames when considering the domestic use of drones for surveillance. The possibilities for significant shifts in perspective taking were evident in critical moments when new dialogical viewpoints were jointly produced, while limitations were clear in other interactions when the second narrative was appropriated to fit the dominant narrative.

Significance: The case study offers new analytical and theoretical approaches to studying engineering students’ perspectives on socio-scientific issues as a situated contextual phenomenon strongly shaped by their political imagination.

Authors

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Los Angeles

• Ayush Gupta, University of Maryland - College Park

• Andrew R. Elby, University of Maryland - College Park