Asee peer logo

“You’re just not what they’re looking for”: An intersectional collaborative autoethnography exploring pathways to engineering design doctoral programs

Download Paper |

Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Intersections of Identity and Student Experiences: Equity, Culture & Social Justice Technical Session 10

Page Count

29

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41793

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41793

Download Count

1880

Paper Authors

biography

Kaylla Cantilina University of Michigan

visit author page

Kaylla Cantilina is a doctoral candidate in Design Science at the University of Michigan, conducting interdisciplinary research specializing in the intersections of engineering and social sciences. She obtained two undergraduate B.A. degrees in Industrial Design and Political Science and completed M.S. degrees in Industrial Operations Engineering and Design Science at UofM. Her work is motivated by design as a means for social justice and her research explores the ways that students and practitioners seek to achieve equity in their design practices and outcomes. Through her research, she aims to develop tools and pedagogy to support design students, educators, and practitioners in conceptualizing and addressing equity.

visit author page

biography

Robert Loweth University of Michigan

visit author page

Robert P. Loweth is an (incoming) Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. His research explores how engineering students and practitioners engage stakeholders in their engineering projects, reflect on their social identities, and consider the broader societal contexts of their engineering work. The goals of his research are 1) to develop tools and pedagogies that support engineers in achieving the positive societal changes that they envision and 2) to address systems of oppression that exist within and are reproduced by engineering education and work environments. He earned his B.S. in Engineering Sciences from Yale University, with a double major in East Asian Studies, and earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He also holds a Graduate Certificate in Chinese and American Studies, jointly awarded by Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University in China.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

This research paper used a collaborative autoethnographic approach to explore the two authors’ respective pathways to engineering design doctoral programs. Prior work has highlighted various ways that access to engineering graduate school is inequitable. Through our collaborative autoethnography, we investigated how existing inequities harm and impede access for students with multiple marginalized identities, such as the first author (KC), while simultaneously providing advantages to students with more privileged identities, such as the second author (RL). As part of our collaborative autoethnography, we collected personal memory data, archival data, conversational data, and reflection data. We analyzed these data using intersectionality as an analytic framework to identify specific ways that structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power operated within the authors’ experiences and impacted their pathways to graduate school. The two authors possessed similar and comparable engineering experiences in addition to extensive interests outside of engineering. However, while RL was often viewed as credible and competent as an engineer by peers and faculty, KC consistently struggled to receive similar recognition as an engineer. The authors' different experiences reflect intersectional inequities that impacted the authors starting from early childhood. These inequities further influenced how the two authors presented themselves in their graduate school application materials and ultimately gained access to graduate school. Our findings deepen understandings of how intersectional barriers affect access to engineering graduate school for women of color and may inform mentorship approaches that attend to specific societal inequities experienced by women of color.

Cantilina, K., & Loweth, R. (2022, August), “You’re just not what they’re looking for”: An intersectional collaborative autoethnography exploring pathways to engineering design doctoral programs Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41793

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2022 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015