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Engineering settler colonialism: A. M. K. Peters, ‘Negotiating Methodological Tensions: Resisting Settler Colonialism in Engineering Education Research with Communities’, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2026

18Aug26

Abstract: This critical theory paper reflects on my personal experience conducting my dissertation research in the discipline of engineering education with my Native Hawaiian community. There are inherent tensions that I constantly negotiate in my research practices to find ways to operate within our settler colonial discipline as someone who wants to make visible, resist, and deconstruct settler colonialism. This paper is a chance to describe these tensions, frustrations, and realizations of growth that I go through occupying a space that disvalues portions of my work. I start by reframing settler colonialism as an oppression of the natural world compared to more common framings of settler colonialism as the oppression of Natives through erasing their connection with the natural world. This reframing allows me to demonstrate how engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research are examples of physical, social, and academic processes of Western settling, respectively, based in capitalist relationships to possess the natural world inclusive of marginalized peoples. Positioning engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research as inherently settler colonial and capitalistic explains furthers how by occupying these fields, I inherently am in tension with being Native Hawaiian that opposes both settling through capitalism and possessing the natural world through colonialism. Then, I explain what these tensions are and how I negotiation these tensions through explaining my methodological commitments and what these commitments look like in my research. I outline three commitments: 1) prioritizing mutual causal relationships through cultural understandings, 2) prioritizing the natural world through genealogy, and 3) prioritizing long-term continuity through Unlearning and Taking Space. I hope my explanation of these commitments as my negotiating of the tension of being both Native Hawaiian and an engineering education research provides an example of how we can begin to challenging settler colonialism and its capitalistic relationships through our work beyond Western standards of research.


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