Labor unions have historically played a central role in workers' struggles against injustice, enabling social mobility while creating infrastructure for realizing social change. Engineering graduate students are not frequently given opportunities to interact with labor unions in their fields of study, despite facing a number of issues that labor unions have played significant roles in addressing. These can include issues relating to race, gender, dis/ability, socioeconomic status, mental health, and other power dynamics within workplaces. At a large public university that is a predominantly white institution (PWI), engineering student workers recently participated in a graduate student worker labor strike. A central component of the strike demands were non-reformist reforms toward the reduction of police power. These demands centered policing and police violence as a health and safety issue on campus and in society as a whole.
The present work-in-progress study seeks to use critical and intersectional lenses in an effort to identify and understand engineering graduate student motivations for participation in the labor strike. Graduate engineering students who participated in the strike engaged in semi-structured interviews, using the labor strike as a focal point for conversation topics, including students’ experiences with participation, prior and current understandings of unions, and beliefs about relationships between unions and engineering. Common themes emerging from interviews provide insight into the relationships of participants to broader cultural ideologies within engineering and conflicts or tensions that can result from the interaction of social justice transformations with traditionally held beliefs underlying engineering ideologies. This paper explores the potential of labor activism as a site of further transdisciplinary learning and personal development.
Joseph 'Joey' Valle is a settler on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Bodéwadmik (Potawatomi), Lenape (Delaware), Myaamia (Miami), and Shawnee People that Purdue University is built upon and near and a postdoctoral worker in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Dr. Valle received a Ph.D in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor after defending their thesis on Abolitionist Engineering: An Autoethnographic Approach to Understanding How Abolition Can Transform Materials Science and Engineering. They served as President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) local Graduate Employees' Organization (GEO) 3550, the labor union representing graduate workers at University of Michigan, during the 2021-2022 academic year. Presently they work at intersections of equity and engineering workforce development in the ASPIRE (Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification) Engineering Research Center.
Israa Ali is a senior undergraduate studying Aerospace Engineering.
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0910-8902
California State University, Los Angeles
[biography]
Corin (Corey) Bowen is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education, housed in the Department of Civil Engineering at California State University - Los Angeles. Her engineering education research focuses on structural oppression in engineering systems, organizing for equitable change, and developing an agenda of Engineering for the Common Good. She teaches structural mechanics and sociotechnical topics in engineering education and practice. Corey conferred her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in April 2021; her thesis included both technical and educational research. She also holds an M.S.E. in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor and a B.S.E. in civil engineering from Case Western Reserve University, both in the areas of structural engineering and solid mechanics.
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0319-9583
Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)
[biography]
Donna Riley is Jim and Ellen King Dean of Engineering and Computing, and Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering at the University of New Mexico.
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