Engineering and the values of social justice

Engineering and social justice, as a topic, is gaining increasing attention from engineers and scholars of engineering studies alike. There is an annual ‘‘Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace’’ (ESJP) conference that gathers together practicing engineers and engineering educators every year, and whose numbers are growing. The National Academy of Engineering has made social justice – along with sustainable community development – a focus of two national workshops. Finally, a growing number of articles and books – most notably the Synthesis Lectures on Engineering, Technology and Society series, edited by Caroline Baillie – all take up the topic. The three articles in this issue add to this growing body of work on engineering and social justice (ESJ) through multiple approaches: historical, contemporary, and literary. As such, they provide us with a wider range of disciplinary considerations and case studies for studying ESJ than has been previously available. Although the contexts and scholarly approaches for ESJ research and practice vary, one theme unites the work: the question of whether and how engineering practice and social justice values are commensurate. These are not necessarily new questions for scholars of engineering. Historians Edwin Layton and David F. Noble, respectively, have considered how the engineering profession has been constituted such that it exists largely in opposition to the values and practice of social justice. The articles in this issue continue the work of interrogating engineering and social justice values. The scholars featured here uncover instances in which some of the traditional values of engineering – efficiency, engineering problem-solving, technologism, professionalization – conflict with social justice values, such as equity; fair distribution of wealth, resources, and burdens; and respect for diverse ways of knowing and defining problems. The theme issue begins with Amy Slaton’s historical analysis of 1960s Chicago, and the efforts of city planners to redevelop the city, absent poverty and urban blight. Slaton’s historical approach reveals a significant tension between programs intended to promote growth and modernization on the one hand, and social justice