Workshop Purpose

This workshop is designed to help you think through the process of considering how topics of anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice play into the broader field of engineering and eventually your research. The workshop presents relevant background and communities guidelines, breakout rooms, and case studies to create a space for respectful discussion and learning independent of experience with this topic. Within this website we have put together all of the resources described above so that you can work through as you think about how to:

• Define related terms and connections between anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, and research justice.
• Explain how research and technologies in STEM impact marginalized communities through case studies on various research areas.
• Analyze the impacts of your own research on marginalized communities and actions you could take to move toward research justice.

 

Workshop Outline, Materials, & Components

Below we detail each component of the workshop and the resources involved. Significantly more details on each section can be found in our publication. The entire workshop is planned for 2 hours, where the outline includes 10 minutes of buffer time.

Pre-Work

Prior to the workshop, disseminate and read the following documents. Giving everybody the

• Community Guidelines
• Key Terms and Definitions

There may also be pre-work associated with specific case studies.

Introduction (20 minutes)

Review the community guidelines, Anti-Racism Toolkit, and provide an introduction to research justice. An example of our slide deck for the introduction of the workshop is provided here.

• CYR Workshop Introduction – Slides

Case Study Breakout Groups (50 minutes)

The goal of the case studies is to provide participants with a framework for considering how a specific example of engineering application and/or research connects to social and research justice. Participants do not need to be familiar with the content of their case study in order to participate.

Put participants into breakout groups to work on case studies. Case study documents are designed as interactive worksheets with context-specific information and sources interspersed with guided questions and group discussion prompts. Details on how groups were made can be found in the paper. Case study documents are provided below.

Case Studies Created in 2020

• Air Pollution and Climate Change
• Clean Water Access
• HeLa Cells
• Plastics

Case Studies Created in 2022

• Chemical Plants
• Metal Extraction
• Outsourcing Pollution
• Racism in Medical Research

 

Conclusion Breakout Groups (30 minutes)

The conclusion aims to help participants connect the ideas of social and research justice to their own work based on following the same process and ideas provided in the case studies.

Conclusion breakout groups are different than the case study groups, and are created using a process similar to a Jigsaw wherein each new group made contains members who all participated in different case studies. The participants summarize what they learned in their separate case studies, and then answer questions about their own research.

The conclusion worksheet is provided below:

• Conclusion Group Questions Worksheet

The questions in the conclusion worksheet are inspired by the Free Rads resource Free Rads Research Justice Worksheet.

 

Additional Workshop Details

Detailed explanations of workshop components and hosting considerations can be found in our publication:

K. Chintam*, A. N. Prybutok*, W. Brenneis, J.M. Chan, J.D. Green, R. Li, M. Olsen, S.L. Ramesh, C.E. Ramirez, D.R. Vemulapalli, J. Cole. (June, 2023). Designing and implementing a workshop in the intersection between social justice and engineering. 130^th ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition. *co-first authorship. Best DEI Paper Winner. Retrieved from https://nemo.asee.org/public/conferences/327/papers/37870/view