3
Human Rights and Engineering Education

The panelists in the symposium’s second session discussed their work to incorporate human rights principles into engineering higher education, as well as the added value of doing so compared to solely teaching about ethics. Muhammad Zaman, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University, discussed his institution’s pilot course on engineering and forced displacement and his views on ethics and human rights in engineering education. Bernard Amadei, Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder, founding President of Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA), and member of the National Academy of Engineering, discussed education about human rights in the context of humanitarian and development engineering and the reasons why human rights are critical as a foundation for engineers. Mira Olson, Associate Professor of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering and Co-Founder and Director of the Peace Engineering program at Drexel University, discussed her approach to teaching about human rights in the context of peace engineering. Following the three presentations, Zaman moderated a discussion among the panelists and the symposium participants.

FORCED DISPLACEMENT AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Muhammad Zaman began by emphasizing the value of interdisciplinary teaching, particularly for engineers, who rarely engage with the humanities. Global challenges such as forced displacement are complex, and their interdisciplinary exploration can help provide the holistic understanding that engineers need to appropriately address them, said Zaman. In his current work focused on forced displacement, the first question to ask is “Why engineers should care about the forced displacement of people resulting from conflict, climate change, persecution, xenophobia, and other causes?” Forced displacement, he said, is an issue of growing social and global significance, and forcibly displaced communities face unique challenges regarding health, housing, and access to resources and infrastructure. Although humanitarian agencies play an important role in aiding communities experiencing displacement, they often lack capabilities that engineering can provide, such as technologies, tools, systems analysis, an understanding of logistics, and quality control. Yet, despite a growing need for engineers equipped to engage with these challenges, the supply of such engineers is limited because engineering curricula provide few relevant training opportunities, said Zaman.

Zaman’s landscape analysis of engineering curricula revealed that while schools offered a number of design-based courses, few provided sufficient background on the challenges students were meant to address. The courses emphasized a few select issues such as water, sanitation, and hygiene using siloed approaches and paid little attention to related matters like health or

logistics. Zaman noted that existing frameworks usually consider narrow definitions of displacement that might exclude populations displaced for generations, stateless communities, and people living in conditions beyond typical refugee camps. In addition, detailed analyses of current technological solutions, and especially on their limitations and potential harmful effects in contexts of forced displacement, are seldom discussed and poorly understood. Moreover, existing curricula tend to provide students with insufficient background to design culturally appropriate and rights-respecting interventions, and to focus on challenges arising after the displaced group reaches its destination rather than on displacement as a process.

In March 2023 and May 2024, Zaman and his colleagues at the Center on Forced Displacement, in partnership with the National Academies Committee on Human Rights hosted workshops aimed at designing courses to fill these gaps, reflecting on the lessons learned while piloting these courses, and exploring opportunities for scaling up this project. Zaman piloted his course in spring 2024 as a biomedical engineering upper-level elective (Hussein and Zaman, 2024). The course, which is now a permanent offering in Boston University’s engineering curriculum, enables students to develop a holistic understanding of the health of people experiencing forced displacement, understand drivers of displacement, develop knowledge of mathematical models to evaluate health risks, critically analyze existing technological solutions from a technical and ethical lens, and design interventions to improve the health of these communities.

Zaman said that students are eager to learn these concepts, as evidenced by the tremendous demand for his course, which includes extensive nontechnical reading and interviews with people who have experienced displacement and people working on these topics at nongovernmental organizations. Students work in small groups to design interventions for displaced communities such as for the Rohingya, Indigenous communities in Colombia and migrants in the Sahel region. “The point is that the students have to go beyond the newspaper articles to dig deep and learn about issues that they may not have heard about,” said Zaman.

For instructors, a key takeaway from the pilot course was the importance of shifting mindsets and ensuring that everyone speaks using the same terms and a with shared conceptual understanding. Another takeaway was the complexity of effectively incorporating the lived experience for students, the different forms it can take, and the unique value it brings. Zaman noted that the sense of community—of people with different expertise working together to design and pilot the courses—was a major strength identified by instructors.

According to students, a key takeaway from the course was the recognition that no one-size-fits-all solution exists for people experiencing displacement. They also expressed that Zaman’s course was the first they have taken that actively integrated ethical concepts as more than an afterthought. However, students worried about their inability to continue to engage with these issues during their education, because the course is one of a kind (as of late 2024).

Next steps, said Zaman, are to build a consortium of interested institutions to continue to learn from one another and explore areas beyond engineering, such as data science and microbiology. He hopes to develop partnerships with community colleges, which often reach communities experiencing displacement, and institutions outside the United States.

PRACTICAL INSIGHTS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMAN RIGHTS AND ENGINEERING

Bernard Amadei said that although engineering has significantly improved human development and security over the past century, there are still 3 to 4 billion people in the world whose main goal is to stay alive each day because some of their basic human rights, such as water, energy, or security, go unfulfilled. “What is the role of engineering in addressing those abuses of human rights at different scales and in a different context?” asked Amadei.

One way to think about the linkage between human rights and engineering, said Amadei, is to think about the relationship between engineering and society. “Society depends on engineering. Engineering depends on society,” he said. As a part of the problem, students are not learning about human rights, and if they do, human rights are loosely integrated in a course on ethics. When he taught engineering courses, Amadei tried to make clear that an engineer’s role is not only to design technology, but also to think through how that technology impacts people and the environment.¹² Engineering is about designing solutions and ensuring that everyone has fulfilling lives, with their basic needs met and the ability to live with dignity and peace. “Engineers have a professional and moral obligations to society. That is our mission statement,” said Amadei.

A major question for Amadei is whether today’s engineering graduates, educators, and practitioners have the skills and tools to address the global problems that our planet and humans are facing today or will be facing within the next 20 years and beyond. He questioned why 21st century institutions continue to educate their students using 20th-century curricula and 19th-century institutional structures. Because today’s global issues are nonlinear and horizontal, modern education should be transdisciplinary, not confined to vertical academic silos. “Most problems we face today are global, integrated, and systemic,” said Amadei. “They require young people to go to the field and talk to people.”

Engineers must be changemakers, peacemakers, social entrepreneurs, and facilitators of sustainable human development, said Amadei. Engineering and engineering education must be a lifelong, reflective, and adaptive practice based on systems thinking and a holistic approach to global problems. Engineering education must integrate ethics and culture and produce engineers who are not only “global,” but also what Amadei calls “globally engaged.” These engineers have a deep understanding of themselves and gain the ability to interact effectively with diverse stakeholders through experience.

Amadei noted that he started EWB-USA¹³ 20 years ago. Today, EWB-USA has roughly 10,000 student and professional members in the United States. It has completed 1,100 successful projects that have positively impacted more than 5 million people worldwide. The program’s students take on a project for 5 years and integrate that project into their education, which includes working in the field. Through his travels across the world, Amadei has seen human rights violations, but he has also seen creative people who want to improve their lives and well-being and make the world a better place. “Let us empower all these people,” said Amadei.

Amadei concluded his remarks with a quote from Albert Einstein: “The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we

created them.” Abuses of human rights, poverty, and injustice have been created with a mindset that must be replaced, said Amadei. “We need young people to come and tell us what they want and how they are going to address the problems of the world that we are facing today so we can make the world a better place,” said Amadei.

PEACE ENGINEERING

Mira Olson views peace as an umbrella for integrating environmental justice, social justice, sustainability, ethics, and partnerships in engineering education. The challenge, she said, lies is determining what new modes of engagement, research, education, and design are needed to elevate these values within the educational environment and the modern workplace, and then taking steps to accomplish that goal.

Olson noted that developing a vaccine does not impart immunity—“getting it equitably into everyone’s arm is what produces immunity.” The questions, then, are “Where does the responsibility of the engineer begin and end?” “How do we educate engineers so they take those extra steps and are not just designing a thing but making sure it is accessible?” “Can we get to the point where human rights drives engineering education and design?”

As an example of how she approaches these questions, Olson described the hydrology class she teaches, which considers the problem of stormwater management using a framework for conflict-sensitive engineering design (Figure 3-1). This framework extends beyond simply identifying inputs and outputs to examine why there is flooding, who it affects, and who benefits from flood water control. “I ask my students to think about why we are doing something and you sometimes get to the point where they are able to think about designing for basic human needs, basic human rights, and peace outcomes,” said Olson. Her challenge as the instructor is to accept that the students’ solutions might be an evacuation or communication plan rather than construction of a stormwater basin.

Olson commented that it only took a couple of decades for life-cycle assessments to become part of the standard design process. We now have the ability to assess the materials being used, the energy required, and the waste produced at every stage—from a product’s initial

design and usage to its end of life. Olson questioned, “Can we do the same for social impacts? Who has input into this? Who needs this? Who’s going to use it? Who’s going to benefit? If you’re designing for someone and they are using it, what happens to the non-users? Are you creating a disparity or further dividing in inequity? How could it possibly be misused?” As a final comment, she defined peace engineering as the application of systems-level science and engineering principles to support conditions for peace, which is “a state of human existence characterized by sustainable levels of human development and healthy processes of societal change” (Ricigliano, 2012).

DISCUSSION

In the ensuing discussion, an online audience member asked how educators can help students embrace discomfort, ask who matters most, and recognize engineering’s deep connections to human rights, even when systemic issues feel overwhelming. Amadei said that today’s engineering curricula are based largely on schooling and book learning but that students must also be exposed to real-world issues outside of the classroom because “we know the reality is quite different from books,” he emphasized. Amadei cited two examples of such models: the Kigali Institute of Technology in Rwanda (Schendel, 2016) and the 5-year engineering bachelor’s programs at Drexel University,¹⁴ where students have the opportunity to spend significant time living in and working closely with communities in addition to learning fundamentals of engineering through book studies.

In response to a question about the ways that engineers can address the deep societal issues that may be associated with the tools they make, Olson said that in the early days of engineering, engineers designed things that they needed—for example, shelter, roads, water delivery—using the materials available to them. Today, however, engineers are designing things using materials from around the world for people they will never meet, which means losing the feedback loop that informs whether those things are needed and whether the resources to support their use are available. “We have to force ourselves at the beginning of the process, not at the end, to question who needs this, who is going to use it, what will they use it for, and who does not need it,” she said. She noted that the defense and oil and gas industries generally fund university engineering research, so the tools developed by academic engineers typically fit their needs. “But if we ask ourselves those questions up front—who are we designing this for, who needs this, and what are we using—we would probably build different things,” said Olson.

When asked how universities can incorporate ethics and human rights into engineering education, Amadei said that part of the issue is that young people need to have an understanding of their rights and obligations as human beings before they enter the university. Therefore, more work is needed to incorporate concepts such as ethics, conflict, and sustainability in elementary and high school curricula. Amadei has tried to expose his students to eye-opening situations that they may be unaware of, including disadvantaged communities in the United States. For example, Amadei and his students have been working with a community in Colorado that suffers from abnormally high rates of cancer and miscarriages, likely connected to contaminated drinking water. Amadei believes that students learn best through hands-on experience, adding, however, that students should not conduct fieldwork without professional guidance. On EWB-

USA projects, student teams are always accompanied by several professional engineers who review their designs, go with them into the field, and provide guidance. Amadei said, “Students are always surrounded by professional engineers. Why? Because they learn the ropes by doing.”