This engineering which is not one: Encountering Irigaray in heat and mass transfer

In a Heat and Mass Transfer class, seven female junior and senior engineering students were engaged with a rare, contentious, but potentially empowering feminist critique of fluid mechanics. French thinker Luce Irigaray´s “The `Mechanics´ of Fluids” was taught as part of an NSF-funded project implementing liberative pedagogies in engineering education. The goals of engaging students with Irigaray´s argument were to encourage them (1) to think critically about fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, and gender in engineering; (2) to learn to situate themselves within what is traditionally a male-oriented discourse, and take some ownership over it as a form of liberation; and (3) to re-imagine feminist engineering approaches to heat and mass transfer as a form of reflective action. We first motivate our approach of teaching engineering methods and their critiques in dialogue. We then introduce the work´s theoretical positions in the context of later feminist critiques and describe how it can be in dialogue with engineering and that in spite surface readings to the contrary.