Alice's MISs from Week 11 class

My offerings for the most important sentences from the 4 readings from this week's class:

Slaton 2001: 

 p. 51 -- “The materials experts, outlining requirements for success in their field, attached moral and cultural achievement to a set of personal features – namely, masculine gender and other “inherited” characteristics. With this kind of attachment one could formulate an image of good engineers as best derived from a “stock” of white males. If gender and ethnic origin can be seen to determine technical prowess, one then has a means of attaching technical ability, and all its associated social rewards, to that social “stock.”

or 

p. 60 -- “The presentation of character, religious practice, gender, race, and even voice and hair color as matters pertinent to technical operations fits with the subjective nature of technical work outlined within engineering coursework.

Slaton 2010

Ch 4 

p. 100 -- “It is exactly the nature of the “pool” that requires historical analysis if we are to understand the ongoing underrepresentation of African Americans in engineering. If a student arrived at the end of high school without having achieved visible and conventional measures of academic success, he or she was not invited into the world of higher engineering education. This was disproportionately the case with minority students who made up the majority at underfunded, inner-city high schools.... Thus, to mandate the admission of only qualified and not qualifiable students put the burden of integration on a part of the education system that patently was not doing its job.”

p. 101 -- “What would have happened if institutes of technology and universities, given enough support and sanctioning by employers of their engineering graduates, took over the task of remedial education? Schools could conceivably maintain sound material standards for engineering but train students over longer periods, with greater provisions for remedial instruction. Even if such instruction costs more than existing approaches, why have educators and policy makers historically not found it worth expending such resources to correct a social inequity?”

p. 133 -- "These familiar categories of analysis [connect to Bowker & Star!] helped to naturalize the idea that economic activity can connect apart from social considerations. To suggest that social matters can or should be introduced into economic decision making obscures the fact that economic priorities are born of social priorities.”

p. 134 -- "What did it mean for engineers to insist in this period that “technical” and “social” were two different epistemic categories?"

Bix 2002

p. 730 “These treatments embedded lessons in physics and engineering squarely inside culturally acceptable boundaries of women’s knowledge.”

Bix 2005

p. 123 “War even fostered appreciation of the potential talent of women in home economics, especially those majoring in domestic technology.”

p. 125, "Cadettes’ presence also led male engineering students to reevaluate assumptions linking technical education to masculinity."

Folks did a nice job picking these themes out (even through other sentences).  Thanks for putting them on the blog so we can remember them too.