1. Deconstructing the White Savior Model through Engineers Without Borders student chapters: an unlikely intervention.
- Author
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Thompson, Lizabeth L., Chan, Andrew Thomas, Cannon, Julia, and Lehr, Jane L.
- Subjects
SUSTAINABLE development ,COGNITIVE dissonance ,VOLUNTEER tourism ,NEOCOLONIALISM - Abstract
For many students in Engineers Without Borders (EWB), their desire to join the club is fueled by a desire to help others, pay back, or contribute to social good. Some students, as they explore scholarship and discussions on the criticisms of sustainable development, experience a sort of cognitive dissonance as they continue their work within organization they are not entirely aligned with, often questioning the impacts and motivations of their own efforts. At EWB, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly, SLO), we have intentionally encouraged this process, with a desire to allow people to confront the difficult questions regarding global development. This paper will outline the salient theories, frameworks, and criticisms regarding sustainable development work and its connection to voluntourism, capitalism, and neocolonialism. Recognizing that these attempts to help others are in reality student-centered [1] and tend to fail the partner communities [2], we desire to investigate how to better center partner communities in our work [3], and describe several attempted interventions into our chapter that seek to center these concerns and more critically examine our efforts to make a positive impact and minimize our unintended harms. We also describe individual stories of this transformational process, examining our collective positionalities as "outsiders within" seeking to change an institution we are a part of but not entirely aligned with [4]. Finally, we describe the directions we are moving in to further encourage reflection and action to center sustainability and community agency in our efforts [5] [6]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022