Creating Counterspaces in Canadian Engineering Education: Moving to the Center

Background: In engineering education, the cultures of engineering and academia intersect in ways that can impact a scholar’s sense of value and belonging within their institution. This is especially true for women and gender minorities due to the reification of historically masculine values within these cultures. Counterspaces are spaces within institutions where minoritized community members can feel supported and valued. The limited formalized pathways and supports for engineering education mean these counterspaces are critical sites for scholars to grow the field.

Purpose: We explore how the creation of engineering education counterspaces is shaped by gendered norms.

Approach: This work employs collaborative autoethnography. Through two iterative cycles of data collection, we composed written responses to reflective prompts, meeting weekly to discuss our experiences. We drew upon an expansive meaning of “gender” from feminist literature that allowed us to interrogate disciplinary norms, performances, and expectations within the data. Multiple rounds of coding led to the emergence of cross-cutting themes.

Findings: We create counterspaces through feminized networks of support and collaboration with people, often women, who share our values. Caring labor plays an important role in building and maintaining these counterspaces, which intersects with our different desires to take on or avoid the role of “mother” in the academy. Gendered values in institutional processes, such as tenure and promotions, can create challenges when trying to push counterspaces towards the center of academic institutions.

Conclusions: In creating and maintaining counterspaces for and within engineering education, we must consider gendered norms within engineering education, engineering, and academia. This is especially important as we attempt to move these counterspaces “towards the center” so that we do not further marginalize minoritized faculty members and students who count on these counterspaces to survive and thrive.