Men Against Fire

Yesterday I watched Black Mirror season 3 episode 5, Men Against Fire. Something about it hit me in a deep place, too deep for me to immediately recognize where. It had a little to do with all of the similarities with the Holocaust, but I knew it was something more than that. Thinking just a few minutes ago about how I would enter writing about my research, it hit me.

What is particularly interesting about this episode is how an actual rift in identity (in this case, Gee would call it a biological identity) is exploited to create a larger, artificial rift in identity that minimizes empathy. So the mechanism at play throughout the whole episode is a learned identity difference that is systematized and thus the system as a whole has less empathy to spare, to influence it. This reminds me of Schon and Argyris' model I and model II organizations.

How does this play into my research? Engineering is a community of practice that does the same thing. We emphasize an identity difference that separates us from the public. When we travel from the periphery to the center of the engineering community of practice, are we moving away from our identity as a citizen? Are the identities of engineering and "the public" mutually exclusive? Do they compete for salience or centrality?

I can imagine that in some way, they do. Schon talks about the assumptions of "extraordinary knowledge" that professionals make to differentiate themselves from laymen. That being the biggest differentiating factor, I wonder about the nuances of engineering identity that differentiate one from being a member of the public.

And how better to understand this differentiation than by studying the transition? When I mentioned what my auto-ethnography would look like if I wrote one, the true subject of that for me was transitioning into a field where empathy did not have currency, and where, again, the norms of engineering competed with norms of my identity. When students from capstone transition into work, what identity struggles do they have? What identity rifts are created by their work? How is the public or the customer defined in the community of their workplace? And how much empathy does that leave the engineers with? And more on the transition: it's very possible that the students engineering training has prepared them with this identity rift going in, in which case they will struggle less. There is also the possibility (though my expectation is that this is unlikely) that a public identity and an engineering identity are practiced compatibly in the engineering workplace.

I guess the larger question to start with is, what features of their identity do students have to suppress or sacrifice or simply change in order to become part of a community of practice of engineering? How do the identity features of the workplace compete with the identity features that students might have in other places of their lives? Already the work of Cech and Samuelson & Litzler point out that students must resist in order for their LGB identities or their Black identities to be practiced alongside engineering. I have neither identity, and yet I have still felt the need to resist if I am to be both myself and engineer in the practice setting of college. What identity was engineering inauthentic (to use the words of Faulkner)? My suspicion is a citizen identity. By what mechanisms was this in-authenticity expressed?

And my final interest: convincing the engineering community that this identity rift/rejection is simultaneously harmful for engineers as people with many identities, harmful for the public that is deprived of empathy in the designs for the public, and harmful for the engineering practice that must rely on creativity and innovation. Reducing identity rifts, listening closely, knowing our customer well: these are necessarily in the toolbox of the innovator, and we limit the practice of engineering by knowingly or unknowingly leaving those tools unincorporated.