SASNET Seminar with Janwillem Liebrand: "Whiteness in Engineering: Tracing Technology, Masculinity and Race in Nepal's Development"

Janwillem Liebrand from Utrecht University focuses his research on the practices and politics of water use and management, land claims and food security, as well as the role of engineering, and science and technology expertise in promoting development interventions. His method of inquiry is actor-oriented and feminist-inspired. It is based on field work, document research and historical analysis: observing and talking to people who are using, managing and 'living with' water. Janwillem Liebrand studies how engineers design technology and what experts think/do when they translate and simplify complex ground realities into 'workable' development policy models. 

About the book

The book Whiteness in Engineering: Tracing Technology, Masculinity and Race in Nepal's Development, published in 2022, is an exemple of this feminist-inspired, post-colonial, interdisciplinary research work. The book presents different dioramas on everyday engineering practices in the field of irrigation, food production and water resources management. Viewed through a peephole, dioramas animate events in a way that they look real by placing material (objects, figures) in front of a painted or imagined background. They bring to live why it is that engineering so often fails to fight for social and intellectual transformation, and also why technology-based interventions tend to reinforce dynamics of race and gender discrimination in society. In bringing these issues to the fore, the book provides an original basis for rethinking the position of engineers and technology experts in development, and how their mission of achieving sustainability goals could be realized.