Editorial

Abstract

Greetings for a new year and a new volume of Engineering Studies. Issue 11.1 has some exciting content, all broadly concerned with how to educate interdisciplinary engineers who will be more attuned to societal context in their design practices. Yet despite that common thread, this issue’s two articles, one Report, and one Critical Participation piece approach the topic from very different directions. That diversity in striving toward a common aim is one of the strengths of this field and its journal. The most personal of this issue’s contributions is our Critical Participation piece, ‘Interdisciplinarity in Practice: Reflections on Drones as a Boundary Object’, by Elizabeth Reddy, Gordon Hoople, and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick. The authors describe a course at the University of San Diego created by Hoople (a faculty member in USD’s School of Engineering) and Choi-Fitzpatrick (a faculty member in USD’s School of Peace). The point of the course was to foster an interdisciplinary environment in which engineering and peace studies students would teach and learn from each other and cause each other to question their own assumptions. Reddy, as a postdoctoral fellow and cultural anthropologist supported at USD by the National Science Foundation, approached the course as an ethnographic field site where she could interact with the students and facultymembers participating in one of the projects funded byNSF’s Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments program. Hoople andChoi-Fitzpatrick assigned the students to develop a ‘drone thatmight have a positive social impact’, on the theory that ‘drones’ (a popular rather than technical category) are a controversial technology thatwould nudge the students toward frank and productive interdisciplinary debates. Unfortunately, the interdisciplinary ideals of the course fell somewhat short in practice. Instead of the peace studies students prompting the engineering students to take amore critical stance, in practice the presence of the engineering students seems to have given the peace studies students leeway to take a less critical stance. Fortunately, the authors take that setback as an opportunity to reflect on what happened, draw some lessons, and put their experiences in front of the engineering studies community for further discussion. One thing I like about this article is that it reinforces the long-standing ties between peace studies and engineering studies; these are fields that ought to be natural allies.1 But intellectuallywhat I find exciting here is the intersection of two forefront topics in engineering studies and related fields. On one side, there is now a fast-growing critical literature on interdisciplinarity. For many years now, ‘interdisciplinary’ has been used as a synonym for ‘good’ on many university campuses, especially but not only in North America. And interdisciplinarity can be a force for good, as this journal tries to demonstrate. But it is not an automatic good, and it somecases it canevenbecounterproductive to its promoters’ aims.2 We need a critical understanding of interdisciplinarity if it is to do the things claimed for it – and articles like this one are an important contribution to that.