Boundary Objects and Institutional Change

The “Making the Case for Ourselves: Boundary Objects in Critical STS Pedagogies” presentation really got my mind spinning about the role of boundary objects in catalyzing institutional change. I have always loved the boundary object metaphor because of its power to simultaneously symbolize cultural exchange and the maintenance of identity. These “objects” embody a gentle and empathetic politics that people with different ideological and cultural backgrounds can converse, learn, plan, and strategize around. When I became the director of the STS Scholars program, I was completely intimidated by our position within an engineering school. I immediately received subtle and not-so subtle signals about our marginalized status. Back then, I came to realize that we essentially preformed as the engineering school’s token contribution to campus undergraduate living-learning communities. We had no substantive connections and very few allies. Our budget was small, and our visibility was microscopic. We fought to retain students, as engineering faculty and advisors minimized the importance of humanities and social sciences. Nonetheless, over the years my colleagues Nicole Mogul, Matt Aruch, Logan Williams, Tim Reedy and I began to mobilize multiple boundary objects within the engineering school. While we formally experimented with critical pedagogies (we didn’t call it this) in our teaching and learning spaces, we were also implementing critical pedagogies at the institutional level. We spent countless hours in conversations, demonstrating, meeting, teaching, collaborating, acting up, being uncomfortable, making mistakes, stumbling into opportunities – on and on. So much unaccounted-for labor (and invisible to most) has gone into and continues to go into building a meaningful relationship within the engineering school. But upon reflection, it was boundary objects that were already in place or ones we introduced that did so much of the facilitating common ground for our labor of love.  And through all of this, we have made a lot of headway. We also have a long way to go. Below I leave a list of boundary objects involved in our journey (the list is not exhaustive):

Design

Service learning

Anti-racism

COVID-19 (Pandemic)

Zoom

Student well being

Diversity in STEM

Ethics (tension between macro and micro-ethics)

Science communication

Robots

Apps

Campus infrastructure

Sustainability

Coding

ABET

Engineering Ethics

Socio-technical Systems Thinking

Instrumental Thinking

Ethnographic skills

Focus groups

“Soft skills”

Engineering skills

Technical rhetoric

Innovation

Maintenance

Engineering identity

Professionalism

Empathy

Community

Emerging technologies

“Old”/mundane technologies

Labs

Classrooms

Undergraduate teaching fellows

Mechanical Engineering Design Day

Our Driverless Future (Public Deliberation)

NSF Grants

Forum on the Philosophy of Engineering and Technology (FPET)

Education abroad

Engineering education

Teaching

Undergraduate students

Campus transportation

E-scooters

Bikes

Electric Bikes

Community Forklift

Eco-city Farms

Casa de Maryland

Lake Artemesia