Empowerment, Emancipation and Engaged Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The field of engaged engineering encompasses a wide diversity of intervention approaches and ideals that span from Enactus’ social entrepreneurship to grassroots engineering’s liberating co-construction of other possible sociotechnical orders. In common, these initiatives intend to be empowering, even though this concept is hardly thematized in their publications and has never undergone a more systematic analysis. In this paper, departing from an illustration of that lack of reflection (or rigor) concerning empowerment, a general definition for it is first provided to, subsequently, be specified in seven different dimensions related to the assisted community’s empowerment that can be addressed via sociotechnical interventions, from social inclusion to political emancipation. Thus, it analyzes the relationship between empowerment and emancipation, including the risk of disempowering. Next, an analysis of the interventions practiced by Brazilian Enactus’ leading teams and some grassroots engineering initiatives illustrates the provided conceptual framework. The paper concludes by highlighting key issues of empowerment and its relation to emancipation, and addressing some further research themes related to this investigation: refining the presented dimensions of community empowerment, and analyzing empowerment to the broader context of a sociotechnical intervention (e.g., academia, the the state, civil society and economic actors).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".