Journal Entry, July 2020: Affirmation, Inclusion, Equity and Everyone

When we reflect on 2020, especially in the United States, the divides in society amplified by the pandemic and laid bare for all to see following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in May, 2020 will most likely be the top of mind. We could all see this nation’s history and current complicity for racism, both the systematic and systemic. The moment was not unfamiliar, but markedly different. Initially, we wrote this piece in the summer of 2020, in response to our professional organization’s delay and hesitancy to affirm Black lives, Black students, Black engineers and Black faculty. Many of us were crying out. Allies with commitment to action showed up for and with us -- no questions asked, to ensure that what we felt was at least heard. In nearly a year since our original effort to write this piece together, some things have changed for the better. We saw our professional organization affirm Black lives. We saw some of our colleagues take action, change course and use their influence to make the community better. Some learned, listened and tried to do something new. Others, either remained silent, hopefully in contemplation, but some with a silence that convinces us that they are simply not on the same side. We composed the below entries in the summer of 2020, amid national turbulence and internal reflection. Below we provide four personal stories and some specific calls to action situated in the summer of 2020, but these remain our aspirations and hopes for the field of engineering education.

Interview: Waste, After the Revolution

Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present an interview between podcast host Alex Riccio and Andrea Haverkamp recorded as part of our series After the Revolution. This podcast and interview series is inspired by a desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today, by further focusing on what we might be able to bring about. We begin by highlighting the importance of considering one feature of society than imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how get to this revolutionary society. This paper is the transcript of the interview with edits for readability.

Opening Up The Tools For Doing Science: The Case Of The Global Open Science Hardware Movement

Open science hardware (OSH) is a term frequently used to refer to artifacts, but also to a practice, a discipline and a collective of people worldwide pushing for open access to the design of tools to produce scientific knowledge. The Global Open Science Hardware (GOSH) movement gathers actors from academia, education, the private sector and civil society advocating for OSH to be ubiquitous by 2025. This paper examines the GOSH movement’s emergence and main features through the lens of transitions theory and the grassroots innovation movements framework. GOSH is here described embedded in the context of the wider open hardware movement and analyzed in terms of framings that inform it, spaces opened up for action and strategies developed to open them. It is expected that this approach provides insights on niche development in the particular case of transitions towards more plural and democratic sociotechnical systems.