Nurturing transformational resistance: How humanitarian engineering education shapes students' capacity to challenge systemic inequality

Abstract

Background

Humanitarian engineering (HE) education programs train students to work alongside marginalized communities to improve infrastructure and technology disparities. However, the impact of HE education on students' capacity to challenge systemic inequality is unclear. The transformational resistance framework (TRF) can illuminate how education shapes students' seeds of resistance—their emerging ability to identify inequitable systems in their work and engage in oppositional behaviors that resist, subvert, and transform these systems.

Purpose

This study explores how HE students develop seeds of resistance to systemic inequality and how HE graduate education influences this development.

Design/Method

We conducted 164 interviews with 46 students from seven US-based HE graduate programs over 2 years, focusing on their educational experiences, views on social justice and inequality, and career goals. To analyze the data, we used a grounded theory approach informed by the principles of TRF.

Results

This research revealed patterns in the engineering practices that students engaged in as they began learning about and identifying inequitable systems and structures: some engineering practices stifled their resistance capacity (such as students maintaining emotional, physical, and social distance from project impacts), while others nurtured their resistance capacity (such as students using multidisciplinary perspectives on social good to analyze and improve HE practices). These engineering practices emerged as school policies, curricula, and cultural norms influenced students' responses to the inequitable systems they encountered.

Conclusions

This work contributes to understanding the relationship between HE education and students' ability to challenge inequitable systems in engineering.