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Engineering and Social Justice

Engineering and Social Justice. Difficulties? Possibilities? Sheila Jasanoff Harvard University APPE Mini-Conference, Cincinnati, OH, March 6, 2010. Social Engineering. Social Engineering. Engineering in an Unequal World. Modeling errors: Green Revolution (?)

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Engineering and Social Justice

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  1. Engineering and Social Justice Difficulties? Possibilities? Sheila Jasanoff Harvard University APPE Mini-Conference, Cincinnati, OH, March 6, 2010

  2. Social Engineering APPE-Social Justice

  3. Social Engineering APPE-Social Justice

  4. Engineering in an Unequal World • Modeling errors: Green Revolution (?) • Undervaluing risks: Challenger, derivatives • Planning disasters: Bhopal • Enlarging disparities: Narmada • Marketizing inequality: Carbon trading • Exporting imaginaries: GM crops • Erasing the weak, poor, lay, marginal… APPE-Social Justice

  5. Lock-Ins and Remedies (?) • Imaginaries: democratization • Open up projects to multiple visions • Delegation: participation • Hold experts accountable to diverse publics • Framing: recursion • Revisit initial commitments wherever possible • Materiality: reversibility • Favor undo-able designs where feasible • Measurement: narratives • Supplement aggregated “evidence” with stories APPE-Social Justice

  6. Engineering Experimentality • Sustainability is not permanence • Normative characteristics of good “engineering solutions” • Process-orientation (not only products) • Social feedbacks (not only engineering systems performance) • System-wide knowledge creation (not only at design end) • Built-in critical capacity (not only whistleblowing) APPE-Social Justice

  7. Organizational and Institutional Design • Sociotechnical systems thinking • Justice is not found only in social arrangements, but distributed throughout the system. • Upstream-downstream connections • Upstream design decisions may lock in justice implications far downstream. • Counting and accounting practices • Indicators (risk, cost, benefit) shape and are shaped by justice concerns. • Reflexivity mechanisms • Listening to marginalized voices may require substantial process innovations. APPE-Social Justice

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