Expanding and Mapping the Places of Engineering-Scientific Practice

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Mapping the Places of STEM Education

Abstract

Traditional science and engineering curriculum portrays engineering-scientific practice in laboratories and engineering firms. I re-draw the maps of engineering-scientific practice to include more places to allow for a vision of an inclusive engineering-scientific practice. I provide the example of Stream Team, a student organization of citizen scientists. Stream Team engages with environmental engineering-scientific practice in many places, and I explore how these places of engineering-scientific practice can be political and with material-discursive entanglements. I take into consideration notions of boundary-work performed by the academy along with a critical cartography to disrupt boundaries of ‘what counts’ as engineering-scientific practice. As part of an ongoing visual and place-based ethnographic study, I provide fieldnotes, interviews, and maps of the places Stream Team practices.

Author

• Kevin A. Nguyen, The University of Texas - Austin