Looking for an AUT23 Technical Elective/E&S Elective that also covers your DIV requirement?
Look no further than Julian Marshall’s CEE 498:
>12171 C 3 TTh 830-950 LOW 220 Marshall, Julian
TOPIC: ENGINEERING FOR JUSTICE,
EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION
If you are interested in this course, please email ceadvice@uw.edu and we can help get you registered.
There may also be an opportunity to offer this course at another time so please let us know if a conflict is preventing you from registering.
Course details below.
CEE 498: ENGINEERING FOR JUSTICE, EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION
Objectives
- To explore how Engineering interacts with societal goals of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI), including how engineering practice can support, or fall short of supporting, those goals.
- To inspire participants to reflect on their own professional role and responsibilities in addressing JEDI.
- To build engineering professional skills in reading and listening with empathy; self-awareness; communication; self-criticism; and self-examination.
Audience
Motivated students who are passionate about engineering and JEDI goals, personally and professionally.
Overview
In this class, participants will reflect on how engineering impacts JEDI in society, and conversely, how JEDI-related social goals impact how engineering is practiced. This class has three components:
(1) During most weeks, students are expected to complete readings (and a reading log) and to participate in class and group conversations. Many of the readings are selected by the student.
(2) Each student will lead weekly discussions twice (i.e., during two weeks of the quarter).
(3) Each student will work on a term project, aimed at exploring questions an engineer can ask to understand just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive solutions. Each student will be in a “community of practice” to get feedback on ideas. Students and communities will organize their readings around the frameworks they design.
Motivation, and relevance to engineering
Justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) are fundamental to our mission as a public educational institution. In professional practice, diverse teams are crucial for success in engineering projects and organizations. Diversity brings new ideas and life experiences to the field; diverse teams are more likely to design inclusive solutions for all of society.
Many applications of engineering problem-solving too often focus only on the application of math, chemistry, and physics to solve narrowly defined engineering problems, without acknowledging that engineering can reflect and reinforce inequities present in society. For example, civil engineering infrastructure has been used to perpetuate and enforce racial segregation. Environmental engineering often ignores the environmental racism that communities of color and disadvantaged communities bear the brunt of pollution. Machine-learning algorithms can reinforce biases present in training datasets. In this class, we commit to doing better, in engineering education, research, and professional practice. A goal of this class is to educate ourselves about these topics and apply a framework for improving future projects.