Making the Familiar Strange: One Student's Critical Experience of Engineering Culture Through Space and Place

Physical spaces and places significantly influence educational culture, impacting student attitudes, behaviours, and performance. Within engineering education, where themes of masculinity, competition, and eurocentrism dominate the engineering culture, these environments can perpetuate harmful ideologies and stereotypes that oppress minoritized groups. Using a questionnaire grounded in previous qualitative research and cultural and spatial theory, this study explores the dynamic processes that shape one student’s experiences of the spaces and places in the Price Faculty of Engineering. The cultural themes identified manifest in the educational environment as tokenism, emptiness, left-over culture, disparity in care, and inconsistency in space. This research seeks to raise awareness and encourage mindful reflection among students, faculty, staff, and administrators on how physical places and spaces reflect and contribute to potentially harmful cultural norms within engineering educational institutions.