Meritocracy, Technocracy, Democracy: Understandings of Racial and Gender Equity in American Engineering Education
Meritocracy, Technocracy, Democracy: Understandings of Racial and Gender Equity in American Engineering Education
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精英统治、技术统治、民主：对美国工程教育中种族和性别平等的理解
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发表时间：
2015
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通讯作者：
A. Slaton
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作者：
A. Slaton
技术劳动既能带来个人安全感、满足感，又能带来社会效益，这一理念从一开始就塑造了美国的工程教育。历史上，教育工作者和雇主一直将工程教学视为提高国家公民个人和集体素质的途径。但是，基于身份的种族、性别和其他类别差异的意识形态构成了所有这些主张的基础，并解释了STEM职业的不民主特征，在这些职业中，少数民族公民、女性、LGBT人士和残疾人的代表性仍然不足，尽管几十年来法律禁止此类歧视。本章探讨了使这种不公平的机会分配永久化的两种相互关联的逻辑：技术官僚把工程理解为一种权力关系不起作用的企业；以及工程教育作为一个完全基于对资格和技能的精英判断的领域的相关建设。通过这两种形式，美国工程学支持基于感知到的遗产和基于这些身份的潜在归属的某些社区的持续排斥。本章还概述了在新兴的新自由主义对市场、国家和公民个体作为学习者的代理的理解下，这些意识形态最近得到了加强。最后，考虑到工程知识和实践在歧视性社会关系中的起源，本章提出了这样一个问题：工程领域的多样性改善是否真的代表了一种解放性的变化。
The idea that technological labor produces both individual security and satisfaction and societal benefits has shaped engineering education in the United States since its inception. Educators and employers have historically cast engineering instruction as a route towards individual and collective uplift for the nation’s citizens. But ideologies of racial, gender, and other categories of difference predicated on identity underlie all such claims and explain the less-than-democratic character of STEM occupations, in which minority citizens, women, LGBT persons and persons with disabilities remain under-represented despite decades-old legal proscriptions against such discrimination. This chapter explores two linked logics that perpetuate this inequitable distribution of opportunities: the technocratic understanding of engineering as an enterprise in which power relations play no part; and the related construction of engineering education as a field based solely on meritocratic judgments about eligibility and skill. Through both of these formulations American engineering supports the ongoing exclusion of certain communities based on perceived heritage and ascriptions of potential in turn based on those identities. This chapter also frames a recent strengthening of these ideologies under emergent neoliberal understandings of market, state, and the agency of individual citizens-as-learners. Finally, given the origins of engineering knowledge and practice in discriminatory social relations, this chapter asks whether improved diversity in engineering would in fact represent a liberatory change.