CFP: Engineering and social justice special issue, get your papers in!

Call for Manuscripts: Special issue of Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies on "Engineering and Social Justice"

Editors, Engineering Studies: Gary Downey (Virginia Tech, USA) and Juan Lucena (Colorado School of Mines, USA)

Special Issue Editor: Jen Schneider (Colorado School of Mines, USA)

This planned special issue of Engineering Studies invites submissions from scholars across the disciplines who study engineering and its intersections with social justice.

Engineering, as educational and professional practices often aimed at developing technologies for specific purposes, and social justice, as political practices often aimed at more equitable distributions of advantages and disadvantages in society, may appear at first glance to be incommensurable. Yet many engineers, engineering educators, and engineering studies researchers have been inquiring into relations between engineering and social justice through recent publications and workshops.

For some, social justice seems to offer opportunities for educating future "global" engineers. For others, it appears to offer opportunities to address problems that have long plagued engineering, including low recruitment and retention rates, lapses in ethics education and understanding, and questions about engineering's status as a profession, to name a few. Still others find in social justice important challenges to the theory and praxis of engineering in the world. This recent and growing interest leads us to ask: Why engineering and social justice? Why now?

The editors are especially interested in historical, social, cultural, philosophical, rhetorical, and organizational studies of engineers and engineering in the context of social justice. Possible submission topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• What are the aims of engineering, and how do these aims align with the aims of social justice?
• How do understandings of engineering and social justice shift or evolve across cultural, temporal, and organizational contexts, both within and beyond countries?
• What challenges do social justice constructs or themes pose to engineers and engineering?
• Where and when have images, policies, and/or practices of engineering and social justice been brought together, and what have been the outcomes?

Scholars from all disciplines are invited to submit manuscripts. We are particularly interested in manuscripts that may contribute to and facilitate broader discussions and debates about engineering, research, practice, and policy.

Interested authors should submit titles and 350 word abstracts by March 15, 2009 to the Guest Editor, Jen Schneider, Liberal Arts and International Studies, Colorado School of Mines, jjschnei@mines.edu. Please be sure to include contact information and institutional affiliation as well. The Guest Editor will invite a maximum of five manuscripts for full consideration. All submitted manuscripts will be subject to the journal's normal double-blind review process. Completed draft manuscripts will be due June 15, 2009.

Engineering Studies is published three times yearly by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. See http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/engineeringstudies for more information, including detailed author guidelines.

Also, to join the International Network for Engineering Studies and receive the journal, see www.inesweb.org/join. Annual membership is inexpensive at $56US, or $46US for those who qualify for the discount. If you would like to sponsor a member for one year or need such sponsorship, contact Crystal Harrell, INES Secretary, at crcrigge@vt.edu .