Month: December 2018

Towards a Gender Expansive Engineering – Part Two, Ideas and New Practices for Inclusion

The following is a blog post for the Graduate Society of Women Engineers (GradSWE) written by myself and Rachel Tenney. You can see it on the GradsWE blog here..

According to genderspectrum.org, “gender-expansive” has the following definition:

An umbrella term used for individuals that broaden their own culture’s commonly held definitions of gender, including expectations for its expression, identities, roles, and/or other perceived gender norms. Gender-expansive individuals include those with transgender and non-binary identities, as well as those whose gender in some way is seen to be stretching society’s notions of gender.

We offer a few ideas on how we can move forward in our work to be more gender expansive and gender inclusive.

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Towards a Gender Expansive Engineering – Part One, What’s the Gender Binary?

The following is a blog post for the Graduate Society of Women Engineers (GradSWE) written by myself and Rachel Tenney. You can see it on the GradsWE blog here..

Gender in engineering is an important and much-discussed topic. This might be why you are reading this blog. Organizations such as Society of Women Engineers (SWE) exist specifically due to the underrepresentation and marginalization of women in engineering. However, gender is much more broad than just a simple two-category dichotomy of men and women. We would like to be sure that in our efforts to increase gender inclusion and gender diversity in engineering that we are paying attention to those different from us – women with complicated relationships to gender and nonbinary (third-gender category or otherwise not men/women identified) engineers. This is why SWE is welcoming not only to those who identify as a woman, but to everyone on the gender spectrum – including male allies. This is why we find this to be an important topic to our inclusivity in GradSWE.

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Return of the Elwha

The following is a draft of a paper I am working on. At the moment it is stalled, on the back burner. I am interested in any thoughts, comments, critiques, or paths forward that this line of queer studies engagement in engineering ethics can achieve! Even if this never gets reworked or published, I wish to share this paper I wrote as part of my PHD exams. This is an example of the sort of scholarship I hope to engage in over my career on the side of traditional engineering education research. Engineering ethics is important and is a topic I hope to teach, write about, and research further.

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