Empowerment, Emancipation and Engaged Engineering

The field of engaged engineering encompasses a wide diversity of intervention approaches and ideals that span from Enactus’ social entrepreneurship to grassroots engineering’s liberating co-construction of other possible sociotechnical orders. In common, these initiatives intend to be empowering, even though this concept is hardly thematized in their publications and has never undergone a more systematic analysis. In this paper, departing from an illustration of that lack of reflection (or rigor) concerning empowerment, a general definition for it is first provided to, subsequently, be specified in seven different dimensions related to the assisted community’s empowerment that can be addressed via sociotechnical interventions, from social inclusion to political emancipation. Thus, it analyzes the relationship between empowerment and emancipation, including the risk of disempowering. Next, an analysis of the interventions practiced by Brazilian Enactus’ leading teams and some grassroots engineering initiatives illustrates the provided conceptual framework. The paper concludes by highlighting key issues of empowerment and its relation to emancipation, and addressing some further research themes related to this investigation: refining the presented dimensions of community empowerment, and analyzing empowerment  to the broader context of a sociotechnical intervention (e.g., academia, the the state, civil society and economic actors).