CS 5390: Engineering Ethics:

Sustainability and Social Justice in Engineering on the Border

Fall 2009

TR 1:30-2:50, TBD

Steve Roach and Jules Simon

Text: Engineering and Social Justice by Donna Riley[1]

 

Engineering is the discipline of utilizing natural laws and physical resources to build things that are useful to society. Thus, engineering is an essential component of modern civilization. In a socially just world, individuals and groups receive fair treatment and impartial access to the benefits of society and civilization. Thus, engineering and social justice are inseparable concepts. As citizens of a civilized society, it is important that we at least understand at some level engineering processes. As engineers in a civilized society, we must understand the implications of our engineering decisions.

 

This is an interdisciplinary course is designed for a mixture of engineering and humanities majors. In this course, we will use issues specific to the Chihuahua/New Mexico/Texas border region to explore questions at three levels:

 

i.                     What is social justice? What are values? How are ethics related to politics? What is social activism?

ii.                   What is engineering? What does it mean to identify oneself as an engineer? What social and political controls do engineers have?

iii.                  How can social justice and engineering be combined? How does one engineer for peace or for war? For distribution of resources? For progress? For sustainability?

 

The major project for the course is a collaboratively-produced research paper, originating from an interdisciplinary group of students. The research paper will be submitted for blind, peer-review to the student ezine, Young Scientists and the Ethos of Current Science. Since Young Scientists is a competitive and rigorously peer-reviewed journal, not all research papers are guaranteed publication. However, those students whose papers are published  will have accomplished a significant research achievement: a published paper in the area of engineering ethics. Young Scientists and the Ethos of Current Science is an ongoing student-generated online publication that is cosponsored by NSF, the Center for Science, Technology, Ethics and Policy (CSTEP: http://cstep.cs.utep.edu/research/ezine/ezine.html) and the Medical Professions Institute (MPI: http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?alias=academics.utep.edu/mpi).

 

 


[1] Donna Riley: is Associate Profess or Engineering at Smith College; BA in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University; PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on areas of risk analysis and engineering education.