Tracing Purpose(s) in Practice: A case study of community-centered grassroots engineering in northern Tanzania

• In Event: Community-Informed STEM Learning

Abstract

We report on the Ujima Project (pseudonym) - a grassroots engineering project (Cruz, 2021) that takes place in rural Northern Tanzania (TZ). The Ujima Project brings together: (1) non-profit leaders (US and TZ); (2) engineering and architecture students, professionals, and professors (US and TZ); and (3) community members (TZ). A central purpose of the Ujima Project is to co-design and research sustainable building/construction technologies to: (a) solve climate-change related problems in Northern TZ; and (b) promote livelihoods by generating locally run businesses which create, refine, and sell the building/construction technologies. An ancillary purpose of the project is to train engineering and architecture students to engage in community-centered co-design.

The Ujima Project began in 2022 and has involved more than 100 individuals from different locations and backgrounds. Each individual who has collaborated on this project has unique reasons for showing up, participating in engineering co-design work, and continuing project involvement. These reasons may stem from individual interests, social role within the project, or social identity within the local, regional, national, and international contexts. The diversity of interest on the project can certainly be a strength - various stakeholders within the project approach problems from different angles, and therefore, produce unique solutions. However, this diversity can also produce conflicts and competing interests that can halt project work, or worse, re-produce social inequities among the group.

In this working group, we discuss our efforts to identify and characterize the many different reasons for participating in engineering co-design work in the Ujima Project. This work is on-going, as there are likely as many reasons for participating in the project as there are individuals – if not more. With an initial set of reasons identified, we search for moments during field work where/when competing reasons for participation were in agreement with one another, or in conflict with one another. We do this to better understand how community-led engineering projects can produce more/less equitable social and technical arrangements.

This qualitative case study combines methods from ethnography (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011) and interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to trace how various purposes/reasons surface during field work and shape the resulting engineering and co-design work. The data corpus includes field notes, group-chats, video recordings, and audio recordings from one week of field work in July of 2024, the interim-months of remote work between August 2024 and June 2025, and from a second week of field work in July of 2025.

Initial findings suggest that community members, researchers/professionals/students, and non-profit leaders hold different - and sometimes conflicting - aesthetics, conceptualizations of sustainability, and goals for collaborating. We tell two narratives of where these differences created agreement and conflict that shaped the project work as well as relationships amongst the collaborative. We present broader implications for the design of community-oriented, grassroots, and humanitarian engineering projects.

Authors

• Maximilian Sherard, University of North Texas

• Jessie Zarazaga, Southern Methodist University