The Instrumental Turn in STEM Education

In a (perhaps prescient) forecasting of DH’s own history, contemporary institutional instrumentalism manifests during a moment of self-perceived disciplinary crisis. Before the Crisis of the Humanities served as a backdrop for digital humanities writing in the early 2010s, U.S. STEM education’s crisis moment coalesced in the late 1960s. As Matt Wisnioski has documented, it was in the late 1960s, amid the calls for greater pollution control, the growing evidence of the detrimental impact of industrialization and globalization on the natural environment, the launch of Sputnik, and the subsequent intertwining of the aerospace/aeronautical sectors and military funding in the shadow of the Cold War that members of the engineering profession began to lose faith in the narratives of science and technology’s march toward social progress.14

Engineering education did not always have an antipolitical or anticritical epistemic culture. During the period immediately following the Second World War, technology, which was understood as a natural extension of humanity’s recursive adaptation to its environment, was framed as a driver of both mental and material change in human social networks.15 Thus, technological development was constructed as the moral imperative of engineers and other STEM practitioners: the creation and proliferation of new, global cybernetic infrastructures would allow humanity to better predict, control, and optimize both the Earth and human social development. Engineers thus constructed themselves in the role of philosopher-builders. Engineers had a normative vision of the ideal shape of human society and imagined themselves as possessing the technological and infrastructural wherewithal to design that world into being, unlike their humanist and social scientist colleagues.16

Notably, humanities texts were adopted in STEM education in the early twentieth century. Corporate interests in the 1920s and 1930s had already begun recommending that engineering students be exposed to philosophy and analytic social theory. In the corporate view, liberal education allowed engineers to better predict and control human behavior.17 It was fairly common for polytechnics and other technical schools to establish liberal education and humanities departments, and for engineering students to read texts like Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan. These texts were often read by engineering students rather shallowly and interpreted as justifications for the imposition of technological regulations on social life.18

Whereas the postwar era was dominated by the rhetoric of a rapid and guided natural progression of technology (and therefore of society), technological development during the 1960s’ U.S. military aggression in Vietnam felt anything but predictable and controlled. Rather, Wisnioski argues that the techno-ecological-political crises of the late 1960s shook public confidence in the figures of the engineer and the technologist; cultural narratives of progress in the United States were replaced by narratives of technology out of control, of Sputnik, and of “men on the moon and children on fire.”19

In response to this emerging public distrust, the late 1960s would see the rise of the New Engineers, practitioners from both industry and academia who advocated for the incorporation of critical humanities and social science texts into engineering curricula.20 The New Engineering curriculum worked to identify literature and social theory that was critical of rapid, unchecked technological development and to integrate those texts into the engineering curriculum. New Engineering drew upon then-burgeoning Technology & Society literature, represented by writers such as Herbert Marcuse, Rachel Carson, Jacques Ellul, Lynn White, and Lewis Mumford. Rather than shunting social theory to separate humanities departments as the postwar engineering education model had done, New Engineering encouraged STEM faculty to teach critical texts directly, and it even produced Technology & Society textbooks for the STEM classroom that assumed neither that the students nor that the instructor were well versed in social theory.21 The New Engineers broached the boundaries among engineering, the sciences, and the humanities through written scholarship, pedagogical and curricular strategy, the integration of humanists into engineering scholarly societies like the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and the creation of new academic initiatives such as the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and its flagship journal, Technology and Culture.

Although the New Engineers represented only a small minority of engineering and STEM educators, they soon began to have a substantial impact on engineering education. Bolstered by educational initiatives sponsored by ASEE and helped by supportive engineering deans and school presidents, the curricular infrastructures of some major centers of STEM education were radically altered in the short period from 1965 to 1968.22 At institutions like MIT, Dartmouth, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, UCLA, Harvey Mudd College, and Caltech, the postwar model of engineering education, along with its accompanying pedagogical infrastructure of core engineering classes supplemented by General Education and History of Western Civilization classes, would be supplanted by diverse instantiations of hybrid humanities-engineering education.

The early results of these models were varied and mixed and were not without problems. Many practical issues stemmed from the same conceptual incommensurability familiar to most digital humanists and critical makers: the difficulties of applying interpretive and critical humanistic inquiry to the design of new technologies and artifacts in STEM contexts.23 However, it is difficult to judge what the potential longer-term impacts of these hybrid humanities-engineering programs would have been, because the programs were largely structurally and epistemologically dismantled by the mid-1970s due to the influence of the instrumental turn.

It was in response to the hybrid humanist-engineering curricular experimentations of the late 1960s that the contemporary instrumentalist turn of STEM education emerged. Upset by the growing impact of the New Engineers on engineering education and frustrated by what was constructed as the diluting of core engineering knowledge in engineering students, the conservative wings of engineering education worked to reframe the public concern over large-scale technological growth.24 Wisnioski argues that the instrumentalist response to the social critics of technology was not to deny or dismiss those criticisms but rather to sideline them by differentiating them as a separate domain of knowledge.

Rather than returning to the cybernetic vision of the engineer as manager and controller of social progress, the engineering reactionaries instead depoliticized the technical practices and fundamental concepts of engineering by turning toward abstraction, instrumentalization, and management. The instrumental turn did not operate as a naive view that technological artifacts were simply socially neutral instruments to be wielded for good or ill.25 Rather, conservative elements in engineering education countered the critical lens of the New Engineers not by denying the critical perspective on technical practice but by developing an ideology of “proximate instrumentalism.”26 The engineering curriculum removed any remaining liberal arts and critical humanities literature from the classroom while it shifted the focus of engineering expertise away from hands-on material construction and toward abstract mathematic and physical fundamentals. This dematerialized educational apparatus further divorced engineering students from the social contexts that their creations would once have constructed. Engineering students today spend the vast majority, if not the totality, of their technical education learning calculus, physics, thermodynamics, and managerial decision-making processes. Very few courses have students actually engaging in the development of technological systems, and those that do rarely deploy those designs outside of the engineering classroom setting, thus trapping students within a context of decontextualization.

If engineers were responsible for the social impacts of technology, it was only in a limited, abstracted way. It became the engineer’s function to design systems to specifications given by a client. This client, presumably, had included in the definition of the specifications considerations for managing the social effects of the system. The engineer’s role, then, was to use his or her apolitical technical expertise to bring these managed designs into being. These designs presumably contributed to some sort of social good or at least did not actively contribute to harm. Wisnioski characterizes this shift in the fundamental normative orientation of engineering away from social shapers and toward technical experts as an “ideology of technological change.” To quote Wisnioski:

An ideology of technological change posited that technology was neither good, nor evil; neither was it neutral. Technological change was a semi-autonomous force that was accelerating rapidly, outracing the ability of social institutions [to] adjust. It produced tremendous opportunities, but also social dislocations, alienation, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. Through rational management, however, technology’s negative unintended consequences could be minimized and its positive capacities maximized (original emphasis).27

In the instrumental turn, social concerns of technology became demarcated as either (1) elements that can be rationally, systematically, and first managed and optimized—given enough technical expertise; or (2) elements that are outside the purview of engineering knowledge. Social concerns were placed into one of these two categories on the basis of how easily they could be transformed into questions of technical expertise and incorporated into a managerial decision-making process.28

One need not look further than the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s (ABET) requirements for engineering curricula to see how social and political concerns have been included, and yet also systematized and compartmentalized, in engineering education. Among the eleven “student outcome” criteria engineering programs must meet, social concerns are addressed in only two: students must have “an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability” and must also have “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context.”29 The first criterion labels social concerns as one of many “constraints” on technical design decisions. The second clearly demarcates engineering “solutions” from the social and ecological contexts in which they exist. Not even the calls for “broad education” should give humanists comfort: that specific student outcome is likely to be removed in the upcoming revisions to ABET’s accreditation requirements, as it is perceived as too burdensome for accreditors to measure and evaluate.30

Digital Humanities in/as Instrumentalist Epistemic Infrastructure

The diminished normative orientation of STEM practices has become naturalized in the construction of technological methods as apolitical. As Amy Slaton writes, this conservative ideology of technological change is now so dominant that it serves as an unspoken axiomatic underpinning of broader STEM education, even beyond engineering-centered institutions.31 Not only do these infrastructures influence the kinds of projects that get funded, the availability and quality of lab equipment, curricular decisions, and the presence or absence of humanities faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students; they also produce the epistemic frameworks of those individuals who are a part of the apparatus. Anecdotally, I can say that many of the neoliberal and corporatist initiatives and restructurings that we see foisted upon state-funded universities are first developed and prototyped by private engineering institutions.

I thus want to inflect the concept of infrastructure differently from Alan Liu, who defines infrastructure as “the social-cum-technological milieu that at once enables the fulfillment of human experience and enforces constraints on that experience.”32 Rather than enabling and constraining the activities of users, I argue that infrastructures operate epistemically, as “machineries of knowledge,” to produce those users themselves.33 I borrow from STS scholar Karin Knorr Cetina in arguing that infrastructures of scientific and technical production, including those relevant to the digital humanities, should be understood less as “knowledge structures” and more as “epistemic structures.” For Knorr Cetina, the term “knowledge structures” implies that material-social practices work to produce what we know. The term “epistemic structures,” in contrast, highlights how those practices instead work to produce how we know, by producing and legitimizing the discourses, tools, spaces, and boundaries of knowing and of knowable objects.34 Machineries of knowledge thus produce “epistemic subjects” and “epistemic objects”: practitioners and their always-in-negotiation objects of study.35 While Knorr Cetina largely bounds her analysis to the practices and cultures of scientific knowledge workers, we should extend our understanding of epistemic structures to material-cultural infrastructures as well. I argue that it is in epistemic infrastructures—the tools, institutions, and apparatuses that undergird and produce knowledge practices—where the ideologies and politics of knowledge become externalized and concretized, where they are made durable.36

If we take seriously the epistemic infrastructures of STEM education, it would be wrong to think of students as instrumentalist persons who enter STEM in order to be filled with narrow technical expertise or of engineering instructors as conspiratorial antipolitical agents. Rather, the instrumentalist epistemic infrastructures of STEM education produce students and teachers who are technical practitioners: experts who through their mastery of the fundamentals of math and physics practice the production of “nonpolitical” material systems. Simultaneously, although engineering students generally understand that technology “in the world” has social dimensions, engineering’s epistemic infrastructures produce technology as an epistemic object—Technology as abstract and ideal, methodological and apolitical—and define the boundaries of STEM’s knowledge domain as the exploration of that epistemic object of Technology. Again, even ABET’s call to “understand the impact of engineering solutions in context” explicitly demarcates engineering expertise from the social, political, and material world. It is thus imperative for humanists to learn that engineering students are not taught to build what we might understand as technological systems but rather are taught to practice apolitical Technology.

Instrumentalist epistemic infrastructure is frighteningly effective at producing antipolitical practices. Erin Cech’s longitudinal study of engineering students at four different universities showed that engineering students’ interest in public welfare, social concerns, and the political impacts of technological systems steadily declines over the course of their education.37 This takes place despite that in most engineering programs, what little hands-on design, making, and human-interaction work that students do engage in almost always occurs toward the end of their coursework. This heavy declination of interest in social and political good should be especially concerning given that early outreach programs, particularly at the grade-school level, combine building activities with “use technology to change the world” rhetoric to recruit students into STEM career paths. These programs, which include activities like Lego Mindstorms workshops and hands-on hackathons and may be considered similar to the celebrated making pedagogies in the digital humanities, even consciously recruit women and underrepresented minorities, ostensibly in an effort to diversify the STEM workforce. Upon entering STEM higher education, however, students are subjected to a double “bait-and-switch”: as making and building activities are immediately sidelined in favor of math and science foundations courses, so too are political and ideological concerns systematically excised from the epistemic object of engineering.38 This double bait-and-switch is coupled with a systemic administrative devaluing of interpretive humanities and social science courses. Although engineering students in the United States are currently required to take “broad educational” courses, in my experience engineering students are often encouraged by their academic advisors to take “easy” humanities courses that they can mostly ignore in order to concentrate on their core educational work and simultaneously boost their GPA. Instrumentalist infrastructures thus practice the double move of simultaneously accounting for and defanging the political ramifications of humanities scholarship.

Unlike Cordell’s students who, for various reasons, approach technologically centered humanities classes with reticence and suspicion, technical students who want to take seriously their humanities classes are often attracted to classes such as economics or philosophy of technology that appear to fit in with or dovetail with their technical education, or to classes such as digital arts that allow them to apply their technical skills in the hands-on, self-directed ways that they are unable to pursue in their core coursework. The technological inflection of the digital humanities thus offers a unique incentive for STEM students as well as a pathway for critical humanities and social sciences faculty to productively engage with those students. Ideally, the digital humanities could begin subverting the instrumentalist epistemic infrastructures of STEM educational models and the neoliberal university in general.

However, digital humanities pedagogy is also in a unique position to reinforce instrumentalist epistemological infrastructure. This comes partly from the difficulty of teaching technical skills and critical thought to undergraduates at the same time, due in no small part to the epistemic infrastructures erected in the university postinstrumental turn. Ian Bogost has opined that humanists have to bracket criticality in order to get our grounding in technical skills.39 I certainly sympathize with the pragmatic difficulties of teaching undergraduates code and close reading at the same time, particularly in our contemporary instrumental episteme. However, bracketing technological practice into apolitical skills and social impacts, even in the context of a humanities course, only continues to produce Technology as apolitical epistemic object, as something that can be learned apart from the social and political world. As Tara McPherson suggests, the ontology of brackets is particularly pervasive in digital culture and can actively undermine critical perspectives on technology and ontologies of difference that emerge from feminist, queer, and postcolonial positions.40 Thus, DH’s relative lack of attention to the epistemic practices of Technology can encourage students to assume the instrumentalist stance and, worse, to pretune students to the rejection of politics of difference.

Too often, digital humanists treat digital and technical methods as instrumental tools that can be applied to humanities inquiry or that can be used to disseminate research, as opposed to epistemic and therefore ideological and political positions that researchers assume. Again, a digital-as-method approach reproduces the instrumentalist turn in STEM by positioning technologies as apolitical material that has social implications upon its entering the real world. Edward Vanhoutte implicitly invokes the instrumentalist stance when he attempts to summarize the vast arrangement of activities that make up DH:

For the moment, we know that Digital Humanities tries to model the world around us through success and failure in order to arrive at a better understanding of what we know and don’t know about humankind, their activities, artefacts, and record. And this can maybe serve as a definition of the field.41

Here, digital methods are thus framed as tools that output accumulative data rather than epistemic frameworks that generate ideological—and at times, contestational and incommensurable—positions and knowledge, or as abstract arguments that advance knowledge about the world, rather than actions that benefit some persons and cause harm to others. For digital humanities teachers to seriously engage with and counter the instrumentalist epistemic infrastructure of STEM education, we must use our class time to help students frame their technical education as epistemic positions heavy with political weight, or else run the risk of allowing instrumentalism to frame the humanities criticism as an interpretive realm that floats, disconnected, above and apart from technical expertise.

Digital Humanities as Tactical Epistemic Infrastructure

It is a common refrain for the digital humanities to self-identify as a “tactical” set of practices; as Matt Kirschenbaum has remarked, “digital humanities” as a term can and should be tactically deployed by scholars to “get things done” in the contemporary university.42 In this spirit, DH as tactical practice references the ability to capture funding streams, faculty lines, and administrative attention in an era of increasingly tight institutional budgets and in an epistemic infrastructure that demarcates humanities and social sciences from “high-impact” technical STEM departments on campus. However, the digital humanities can also be tactical in the politically resistive manner that de Certeau employs the term.43 For de Certeau, “tactics” are the small-scale, ever-evolving, everyday practices that those not in power use to disrupt the hegemonic strategies of those in power. Tactics “from the bottom” involve persons on the ground navigating geographic, epistemological, and political spaces in manners that are unthinkable in designing systems of control “from above.” De Certeau himself cites the shortcuts that walkers take when navigating strategically planned urban spaces as a subversive act that allows urban inhabitants to reassert their own agency in spaces largely designed to direct their everyday actions.

Tactical digital humanities can be used to assert the humanities in spaces that are not “our own” and to explicitly challenge the antipolitical epistemic strategies of computing and STEM education. A DH imagined as tactical infrastructure can help students grapple with, and ideally subvert, the very real political and normative entanglements of computing infrastructure. Practically, it is important to recognize that STEM students, particularly those in engineering, have relatively few credit hours to spend on humanities classes. Even engineering students who elect to minor or double-major in humanities or social sciences often find their plan of study weighted toward their technical majors. However, humanities classes can have a tremendous impact upon the educational outcomes of STEM students, particularly when those classes are designed to help STEM students frame and assert their personal and political experiences of their technical coursework.44

In the following sections, I detail two tactics that I have used in my own educational context to help resolve the divide between critical inquiry and technical expertise. Like all tactics in the Certeauean sense, tactical digital humanities infrastructure must be responsive, opportunistic, and flexible in the context of the larger strategic and epistemic infrastructures in which they exist. Responsiveness, opportunism, and flexibility may seem contrary to the language of infrastructure, which implies a certain rigidity and obduracy. But framing DH infrastructure as an epistemic and political position, as an obdurate commitment to a normative conception of computing, can help the development of tactical practices in computation by providing a ground for DHers to put our boots on. A tactical DH epistemic infrastructure can allow humanists to assert and direct computing practices from a critical ground rather than allow dominant computational infrastructures and their politics to direct our attention and actions.

Scaffold Everything—Politically

Ryan Cordell argues the need for digital humanities teachers to “scaffold everything” in our classrooms, both within a single course and across a cohesive curriculum. Cordell largely focuses on students’ technical skills and discourages DH faculty from assuming that students have an innate understanding of coding or computational production simply because they have grown up with computers and social media. “Good digital humanities pedagogy,” Cordell reasons, “must inculcate: not ‘how to use x tool,’ . . . but more ‘understanding how x functions, delineating its affordances and limitations, and then imagining y or z.’”45

Again, I agree with the spirit of Cordell’s suggestion—and it is certainly true that one of the most important tasks in learning the practice of designing technological systems is unlearning the practice of uncritically consuming technological systems. However, again, the frame of scaffolding as narrowly tool-centric plays into the instrumentalist demarcation of political/critical stance from technical tool/method. This demarcation is furthered by the narrative of tools as systems of affordances and constraints. Instead, digital tools produce and are produced by epistemic positions within their subjects. McPherson argues this point in her call for DHers to foreground critical inquiry in their computational projects:

Participants [in DH] call on humanities scholars to learn to code or . . . to acquire advanced technological literacies. I agree, but I would also issue a reciprocal call for coding humanists to engage feminist phenomenology, postcolonial theory, and theorizations of difference. Gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability might then be understood not as things that can be simply added on to our analyses . . . but instead as operating principles.46

Similarly, digital humanities teachers must make efforts to more deeply integrate critical analysis, both of technology and of society, into our classrooms. These efforts are especially important for those teaching STEM students who are being actively divested of their interest in critical inquiry through their core curriculum. As Cordell suggests with technical skills, however, care must be taken to scaffold ideological critique both in individual DH classrooms and across DH curricula. Humanities teachers will already be familiar with the challenges that can arise with teaching critical theory to undergraduates, due both to ideological resistance and to the difficulty of language in many critical texts. These challenges can be exacerbated in teaching digital humanities, where there exist more calls for ideological critique “within DH” than examples of doing that critique, to say nothing of the even greater challenges of teaching ideological critique through the digital humanities to STEM students, whose entire educational infrastructure actively undermines ideological critique.

Humanities and social science teachers need to help undergraduate students, particularly those in STEM, translate critical inquiry through their technological practice.47 I have had the most success in my own classes by tightly bounding both the line of critical inquiry and the technological venues through which that inquiry can be explored. For example, Open Source Art, Music, and Culture, a freshman-only hybrid lecture-studio course cotaught by STS (myself) and arts (my colleagues Silvia Ruzanka and Shawn Lawson) faculty members, combines a basic introduction to politics of technology and queer theory with novice-level programming and craft skills. A class of ninety students represented a diverse set of RPI’s majors but was dominated by computer science students. The “yakking” and “hacking” components of the course consisted of a once-a-week two-hour reading/discussion session and a once-a-week two-hour studio/making session, respectively, with concepts and critique discussed in the discussion section materially explored in the studio section. Importantly, although students were free to influence the direction of both class discussion and studio work, the integrated critical making project assignments were topically and technologically constrained enough to require students to explore the depth of connection between technological practice and critical theory.48

For example, students read queer theory, particularly texts that addressed heteronormative biases in computing, making, and craft cultures, such as Jack Bratich’s “The Digital Touch” and Fiona Barnett et al.’s “Queer OS.”49 Students then considered those in light of open source software’s particular cultures of collaboration and materially explored those critiques through the collaborative creation of open source project development. The projects were designed to redefine the boundaries of what students considered to be open source practice as well as to foreground critique. Projects included open source “Stitch ’n Bitch” sessions, in which students learned the basics of cross-stitching from instructors and online materials and discussed the role of craftwork and gendered notions about technical labor in digital society during collaborative stitching circles.50 Another assignment directed students to expand on Barnett et al.’s Queer Operating System by having student groups conduct independent library research on LGBTQ activist movements, and to paper prototype apps and computational systems that foregrounded the experiences and knowledge practices of queer persons. One student group even went as far as to do some initial digital prototyping of their system using the Processing scripting language.

Although I would not argue that all the STEM students in the Open Source class were transmuted into radical queer theoreticians, the varied reactions to the course assignments were more positive than might have been anticipated. Although there were certainly some students who disengaged with the material and sought only a passing grade, other students became so engaged that they chose to minor or dual-major in STS or the arts. More importantly, many students in the middle reported, at the very least, more deeply questioning the lack of normative and political content in their CS courses. As we iterate the course in the coming years, we hope to more firmly encourage students to connect critical insights in the class to their educational experiences in their technical courses.

Tactical DH infrastructures can be epistemologically scaffolded beyond a single course and throughout curricula, as well. The 2017–2018 academic year at RPI included the prototyping of a new four-course humanities sequence titled alt.code, a minor that builds on the critical-technical foundations laid in the Open Source course. While the alt.code sequence is available to all RPI students, part of its goal is to serve as a consistent, critical humanities and social sciences experience for computer science and electrical engineering students. Following the model established in Open Source, alt.code students will continue to engage in humanities reading and critical making activities throughout the course of the minor. However, the potential strength of scaffolding tactical DH infrastructure through a series of courses is not merely enabling STEM students to continue exploring ideological frameworks of technology. Rather, these courses are intended to serve as a framing experience for STEM students by creating space for reflection on the politics and practices of their STEM majors—and their personal, political, and intellectual relationships to those majors—over the course of their education.

Build Interdisciplinary Connections for Social Capital

For all the debates, differences, and tribes in the “big tent” of the digital humanities, support for the need to build interdisciplinary connections and alliances has been a nearly universal refrain, and so it may be easy to take for granted interdisciplinarity as a tactic. However, what I want to reflect on here are the kinds of tactical connections that DH should build and to what purpose, particularly in teaching students within instrumentalist infrastructure.

One of the strengths of instrumentalist epistemic infrastructure is its resilience to ideological threats via the demarcation of those threats as external to the epistemic object of technical inquiry. As argued by McPherson previously, social context is often bracketed from technical practice in digital culture; this bracketing extends to the historization of computing and engineering technology. McPherson, for example, has traced responses to Travis Brown’s online forum about Critical Code Studies, noting that many argued that “code” was an ahistorical and apolitical “byproduct of a software design” and that the rational mathematics of code and the social-cultural context of code are separate things. Such is the success of instrumentalist infrastructure that even humanities scholars are willing to abstract and depoliticize technical production.51

The willingness to bracket cuts deeply: not only can STEM students be resistant to arguments that explore digital technical practice as political phenomena (indeed, it may be more accurate to call instrumentalism antipolitical rather than apolitical) but that resistance can be doubled when those arguments come from a humanist or social scientist—someone not vetted into the epistemic culture of STEM and therefore an Other. In my own experience, even humanists who can demonstrate their coding chops are often seen, at best, as interstitial interlopers in technical practice. The firm boundaries of the epistemic object of Technology serve to undermine humanists’ and social scientists’ purchase among STEM students.

It is therefore important not only to reach out to STEM students through politically inflected technical practice but also to build interdisciplinary connections with supportive STEM faculty who can help reinforce critical and political perspectives from within the classroom. Although there have been previous calls to build alliances with faculty from computer science and IT, those calls have largely been framed in instrumentalist terms, that is, technical faculty are important because they have technical skills.52 The alliances that DH needs to build, however, are not alliances based on skills but are alliances based on political commitment. Like the New Engineers of the late 1960s, a critical minority of STEM academics are working to mitigate some of the apolitical and instrumentalist ideologies they encounter in their practice. Their generated academic initiatives run the gamut from the American Society for Engineering Education’s (ASEE) division of Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) to the International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace to postcolonial computing talks at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).

Building alliances with critically minded STEM faculty provides valuable pedagogical and infrastructural weight. STEM faculty members have social and pedagogical access to their students that humanities and social science faculty do not have. Computer Science and Engineering faculty occupy epistemically authoritative roles in STEM curricula that allow them to reinforce the need for critical perspectives in the technical classroom and to actually bring humanists into those classrooms. The tactical alt.code initiative at RPI is made possible in part by collaborations with Computer Science faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in modifying Computer Science I, a core introductory class for CS students that teaches the Python programming language. Our new Critical CS1 teaches the same technical skills but through assignments and discussions that center the intersections of power, identity, and computationalism.53 Importantly, these critical perspectives are taught with and through the technical skills that students would have learned during the original version of CS1.

The ultimate goal of the collaboration is to eventually redesign all the assignments and projects of Computer Science I in a politically foregrounded manner. The course serves as an interruption of the ontology of bracketing that CS majors encounter in many of their other technical classes. This course structure would not be possible without Drs. Barbara Cutler, Sibel Adali, Wes Turner, David Goldschmidt, Uzma Mushtaque, and Chuck Stewart, who in addition to intellectually supporting the project also provide the relatively underfunded humanities and social sciences indirect access to some of the infrastructural capital of computer science at RPI.

Importantly, building alliances with STEM faculty also affords digital humanities faculty the ability to be better teachers and mentors to STEM students. By learning the curricular structures of STEM students on our campuses, we can better identify places to tactically intervene in their epistemic development and better work with STEM academic advisors to encourage students to use their free electives and humanities credits to enroll in DH classes designed to frame and critique their instrumentalist educational experiences. Ultimately, building alliances with critical STEM faculty may allow digital humanists to build better alliances with STEM students themselves and to help students understand their own potential roles in the digital humanities not as pairs of hands that use their technical expertise to help complete projects but as full technological-ideological participants themselves in DH scholarship.

STEM classrooms and engineering-centered institutions do not generally come to mind when discussing interstitial spaces in the digital humanities. As mentioned, many of the conversations surrounding tactics in DH center on subverting the tightening budgets for the humanities at universities or strategizing ways to raise capital in a discipline that has not traditionally foregrounded lab work. While the humanities themselves may not receive large amounts of capital at engineering institutions, the access humanists have to equipment and lab space in STEM schools generally exceeds that of our colleagues at many community colleges, small liberal arts schools, and HBCUs. However, instrumentalist epistemic infrastructure has often relegated humanities and critical social science programs to interstitial spaces at STEM schools or has even quashed that type of inquiry outright by demarcating and divesting critical and political thought from the epistemic objects of Technology and technical practice. This making interstitial of the humanities in infrastructures of STEM scholarship has also crept into larger social infrastructures, from large state schools to the technocratic rhetoric of digital culture itself.

However, tactical and critical digital humanities at engineering institutes also provide a model of transformational resistance to technocratic culture. Rita Raley has argued that “the digital humanities should not, and cannot, bear the burden of transforming the technocratic knowledge economy.”54 But if not we digital humanists, then who? Who better to build material-epistemic infrastructures that subvert the bracketing of critical thought and technical practice, that challenge the very ideological tenets of instrumentalism, than digital humanists? By entangling ourselves in the apparatuses of STEM education and by building frameworks for STEM students to ideologically contextualize their own educational experiences, digital humanities pedagogy can make inroads into dismantling technocratic epistemic infrastructure by allying with the very persons in the best position to reproduce it.

Notes

1. Cordell, “How Not to Teach.”

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2. Cordell, “How Not to Teach.”

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3. Kirschenbaum, “Digital Humanities Is/As a Tactical Term”; Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity”; and Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic.

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4. Cordell, “How Not to Teach.”

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5. Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities.”

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6. Cordell, “How Not to Teach.”

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7. Pannapacker, “Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities.’”

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8. Biemann et al., “Computational Humanities.”

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9. Nieusma, “Conducting the Instrumentalists.”

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10. Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives).”

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11. McPherson, “Designing for Difference.”

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12. Snow, The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution.

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13. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

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14. Wisnioski, Engineers for Change.

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15. Wiener, Cybernetics.

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16. Wisnioski, “Liberal Education Has Failed.”

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17. Noble, America by Design.

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18. de Nevers, A General Education Course on Technology.

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19. Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”; and Wisnioski, “How Engineers,” 409.

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20. Wisnioski, “How Engineers.”

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21. de Nevers, General Education, cited in Wisnioski, “How Engineers.”

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22. Wisnioski, “How Engineers.”

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23. Ratto, “Taking Things Apart/Making Things Together”; and Malazita, “Translating Critical Design.”

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24. Nieusma and Riley, “Mapping Engineering and Liberal Education Initiatives.”

    Return to note reference.

25. Kaplan, Readings in the Philosophy of Technology.

    Return to note reference.

26. Newberry, “Are Engineers Instrumentalists?”

    Return to note reference.

27. Wisnioski, “How Engineers,” 410.

    Return to note reference.

28. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers.

    Return to note reference.

29. ABET Criteria.

    Return to note reference.

30. Slaton and Riley, “The Wrong Solution for STEM Education.”

    Return to note reference.

31. Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity.

    Return to note reference.

32. Liu, “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity.”

    Return to note reference.

33. Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures, 3.

    Return to note reference.

34. Knorr Cetina, “Culture in Global Knowledge Societies.”

    Return to note reference.

35. Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures.

    Return to note reference.

36. Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable.”

    Return to note reference.

37. Cech, “Culture of Disengagement in Engineering Education?”

    Return to note reference.

38. Lachney and Nieusma, “Engineering Bait-and-Switch.”

    Return to note reference.

39. Bogost, “Comment on: Koh and Risam, ‘Open Thread.’”

    Return to note reference.

40. McPherson, “Designing for Difference.”

    Return to note reference.

41. Vanhoutte, “The Gates of Hell,” 147.

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42. Raley, “Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes”; Raley, Tactical Media; and Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities.”

    Return to note reference.

43. de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life.

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44. Nieusma, “Conducting the Instrumentalists,” 159–63.

    Return to note reference.

45. Cordell, “How Not to Teach.”

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46. McPherson, “Designing for Difference,” 181.

    Return to note reference.

47. Malazita, “Translating Critical Design.”

    Return to note reference.

48. The “‘critical making’ project assignments” were inspired by Ratto, “Taking Things Apart.”

    Return to note reference.

49. Bratich, “The Digital Touch”; and Barnett et al., “QueerOS: A User’s Manual.”

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50. The project was inspired by Pentney, “Feminism, Activism, and Knitting.”

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51. McPherson, “Designing for Difference,” 180.

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52. Pannapacker, “Stop Calling.”

    Return to note reference.

53. Malazita and Resetar, “Infrastructures of Abstraction.”

    Return to note reference.

54. Raley, “Digital Humanities,” 40.

    Return to note reference.

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