During Yom Kippur morning services yesterday I felt a completely new interpretation and meaning for my own sense of ethics as an engineer embedded within the Sh’ma. As engineers we are all guided by a sense of ethics – whether we realize it or not. These ethics are learned, taught, and honed in our lives before we become engineers and continue to develop throughout our careers. They can come from engineering education, but they also can come from our faith traditions or from interfaith dialogue. I believe there is a lot of room to reflect on the numerous ways we internalize ethics and how they relate to the engineering profession. In particular, I think it is worthwhile to add spiritual ethics as items of consideration and discussion. In this post I wish to talk about what I see as our ethical commitments to the climate as told in the second paragraph of the Sh’ma.
Category: personal
Feminist Killjoy with Andrea Haverkamp
Welcome to our debut episode of Branching Out! This week, I talked to Andrea Haverkamp about gender dynamics in engineering. Listen to the audio from this episode HERE!
Photo by Robert Bye on Upsplash
You can find Andrea at:SJ Engineers. The sources we reference in this episode are:
- The Complexity of Nonbinary Gender Inclusion in Engineering Cultureby Andrea Haverkamp
- Abusing Foucault: How Conservatives and Liberals Misunderstand “Social Construct” Sexuality by Jesi Egan
- Re-Inscribing Gender Binaries: Deconstructing the Dominant Discourse around Women’s Equality in Science, Engineering, and TechnologybyAlison Phipps
- Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)by Sarah Ahmed
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Exploring Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Engineering Undergraduate Experiences through Autoethnography
The following is the abstract and a link to download our paper which was presented at the 2019 American Society for Engineering Education CoNECD conference, April 15th 2019. CoNECD stands for The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity. The paper was written by myself, Ava Butler, Naya Pelzl, Michelle Bothwell, Devlin Montfort, and Qwo-Li Driskill.
Overlooked Diversity – Religion, Faith, & Spirituality
The following is a post I wrote for the Graduate Society of Women Engineers blog – check out the original post here.
When we discuss the many identities we carry in our lives, the most commonly listed are often race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability status. When we discuss diversity and inclusion, our efforts often center on one of, if not the intersection of, these identities. However, one core identity for many of us has seemed to slip through our collective radar – religion and spirituality. “In an era when colleges are expanding their engagement of diversity issues, and at a time when religion plays a central role in public life and global affairs, religion continues to be the dimension of diversity that many institutions leave out.” This is a central claim in Eboo Patel’s article “Faith Is The Diversity Issue Ignored by College Campuses” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in October 2018. In the article, she discusses the possibilities and needs on campuses to recognize this difference. Additionally, she asserts that efforts for religious inclusivity on campus are underfunded, if funded at all. She writes about the transformative possibilities of having interfaith dialogues and unpacking stereotypes and prejudices. As soon as I read this it seemed to immediately ‘click’ – and I’ve become pretty passionate about the subject. Eboo Patel is right – religious diversity is often left out. Why should we start paying attention to this?
Continue reading “Overlooked Diversity – Religion, Faith, & Spirituality”
What have I been up to?
The busy, busy life of a doctoral candidate and community member
I have been quite busy, as all graduate students seem to be. I do not glorify “busy” – our culture is one which holds “being busy” in high regard, in contrast to the pejorative framing of “not doing anything.” I love to do nothing. The times I am doing nothing are often some of the most enjoyable times in my day.
