Abolitionist Engineering: An Autoethnographic Approach to Understanding How Abolition Can Transform Materials Science and Engineering

Abstract

Climate change is pushing many ecosystems toward collapse, bringing irreversible consequences for life on Earth. Climate change is driven by colonial relations and the undermining of Indigenous sovereignty; however, I posit that this understanding is not reflected within dominant materials science and engineering (MSE) specifically and dominant engineering more broadly. The research problem addressed in this study is how the assemblage of dominant engineering enacts performances structured to separate Indigenous land from life, focuses on properties that expand industrial complexes rather than transforming material conditions to affirm life, and upholds processes that refuse accountability to sociopolitical and socioecological contexts of dominant engineering labor in order to maintain the U.S. settler colony. I leverage a theoretical framework of queer theory and abolition to unpack relationships among settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and dominant engineering. In doing so, I discuss the narrow set of ways of knowing and ways of being legitimated within dominant engineering and how I have come to understand them as incommensurable with my relationships and obligations. I put in conversation conceptual frameworks of the materials tetrahedron as a representation of relevant relationships within dominant MSE, the concept of a third university from la paperson that holds a mission of decolonization, and a prototype engineering inquiry ecosystem that (re)centers the purpose of engineering inquiry as liberation/land back. I use the self-study methodology of autoethnography alongside the scientific method to tell stories rooted in my experiences as a settler labor organizer, community organizer, MSE student worker, and engineering education researcher at and around University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. As an electrochemical energy storage (battery) researcher, I studied impacts of changing lanthanum content in the lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO) structure Li6.5La2+xZr1.5Ta0.5O12 and observed an increase in ionic conductivity from 0.649 mS/cm at x=0.2 to 0.789 mS/cm at x=1.0. Transitioning to a sodium solid electrolyte NASICON, I observed that changes in particle morphology from spray drying and heat treating NASICON particles at 900C resulted in an increase in total ionic conductivity from 0.292 mS/cm to 0.596 mS/cm. Methodological incommensurabilities of that labor with undoing relationships driving climate change pushed me to take accountability for harm I have been complicit in through studying within this dominant construction of engineering. I propose abolitionist engineering as a paradigm shift from dominant engineering capable of transforming the conditions and behaviors structuring harm in dominant engineering. I offer a deconstruction of dominant engineering, discussing its relationship to the maintenance of the U.S. settler colony through a metaphor from higher education studies called the house modernity built as well as the assemblage of an engineering-industrial complex. I discuss abolitionist labor organizing as a means of transforming harm that dominant engineering perpetuates, rooting in experiences of engineering student workers that participated in an abolitionist labor strike to name strikes as a form of liberatory pedagogy for engineers. Finally, I offer an example of how an abolitionist MSE education lesson might look by connecting crystalline ‘defects’ from dominant MSE to sociological theories of change used in a workshop series aimed at undoing barriers multipli-marginalized engineering undergraduate students face in bringing their whole selves into engineering spaces. From that lesson I propose a nucleation and growth theory of change to shift from dominant engineering to abolitionist engineering alongside life-affirming technologies like mutual aid and taking responsibility for normalized harm in institutions.