Missouri University of Science & Technology

Educational Offerings

Zine Lab: PIT-Engaged Communication for Gender Justice

The Zine Lab leverages zine-making, a historical countercultural form of publishing, as a public interest technology to instill communication, collaboration, and content creation skills that advance gender justice and promote technological equity. Scholars, students, and community partners at Missouri S&T and East Carolina University will produce four zines covering gender-affirming technologies, reproductive health care technologies, technologies affecting survivors of gender violence, and technologies affecting women and gender minorities on campus. Outcomes include a toolkit for educators with lesson plans, activities, and media resources.

Principal Investigators

Ryan Cheek, Assistant Professor of Technical Communication, Missouri S&T

Erin Clark, Associate Professor of English, East Carolina University

Educational Offerings

Cultivating Homegrown Talent: Rural Infrastructure Challenge Summit

Rural communities often have inadequate infrastructure due to low return on investment. To make matters worse, there are concerns about a “brain drain” limiting human capital to find creative solutions to these infrastructure challenges. Rather than train people who go to
rural areas to do this work, we need to train rural people.

At Missouri S&T, 23% of undergraduate students grew up in rural communities – who are also most likely to return to those same communities. We propose to hold a recurring in-person summit to support students developing an entrepreneurial mindset, enhance participatory research with rural communities, and excite students to pursue careers devoted to improving rural resilience. The summit will be a semester-long engagement anchored with 2 one-day events at the beginning and end of the semester. The students will spend the semester developing proposals as part of existing courses and the top ideas will be awarded cash prizes.

We will co-design the summit with students and external stakeholders to ensure shared ownership. Participants will include students, faculty, rural infrastructure professionals (e.g., rural co-op operators, regional planners, county commissioners), and rural community members (e.g., farmers, business owners, retirees, non-profits). Key evaluation metrics will include (a) empathy, perspective-taking, and collaboration skills, (b) societal engagement, (c) career awareness, (d) interest in participating again, and (e) diversity of participation. In the long term,
we intend to implement this program as a core part of the Kummer College of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development.

Principal Investigator

Casey Canfield, Associate Professor, Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

At Missouri S&T, we have been working to help students and faculty critically assess the ethical, political, and societal implications of new and existing technologies. The Center for Science, Technology, and Society (CSTS) is a university-wide hub for interdisciplinary conversations across campus and beyond (see attachments). This group organized a symposium on Biomedical Humanities in collaboration with the Center for Biomedical Research in 2018, hosted the 41st Annual Humanities and Technology Association meeting in 2019, and hosted an NSF-funded national symposium on the “Futures of STS on Engineering Campuses” in 2021. In 2023, we will host a symposium on the topic of “Technology and Good Living,” with keynote speakers Jeremy Greene (Johns Hopkins; author of The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth) and Andrew Deener (U Connecticut; author of The Problem with Feeding Cities).

S&T has a reputation for experiential learning, which is a graduation requirement. We have developed two new undergraduate certificates “Technology, Philosophy, and Ethical Futures” (see attachments) and “Science, Technology, and Society” as well as an undergraduate minor and certificate in “Sustainability”. There is also a minor in “Latin American Studies for Technical Applications” to support Engineers Without Borders (see attachments). In November 2022, CSTS will host our first student research symposium. Participating in PIT-UN would increase student engagement in these conversations.

Joining PIT-UN will support the newly created Kummer Institute and Kummer College of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development (see attachments). The goal is to make S&T a leader in integrating technological solutions into educational and social research efforts. For example, 400-500 Kummer Vanguard Scholars participated in discussions on social responsibility, such as the ethical considerations of genome editing (led by David Westenberg in Biological Science).

Lastly, faculty have related research and existing collaborations with current PIT-UN members. For example Casey Canfield (Engineering Management & Systems Engineering) is collaborating with faculty at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to address challenges using wireless networks to expand rural broadband access (see attachments). There is active research on trust in human-AI teams by Daniel Shank (Psychological Science) and Don Wunsch (Electrical and Computer Engineering). Shane Epting (Philosophy) researches transportation, infrastructure, and urban futures (author of The Morality of Urban Mobility: Technology and Philosophy of the City). Fateme Rezaei (Chemical and Biochemical Engineering) is developing carbon capture technology to decarbonize the cement industry. The PIT-UN networking would be invaluable to improve the impact and relevance of research.