The making of the engineering student : A study examining the societal and cultural production of the subject, the engineering student

Sammanfattning: AbstractThis thesis makes a novel and original contribution to the discourse surrounding engineering education, and how it can be made more accessible to underrepresented groups. The study includes two contexts representing two different perspectives. Two studies are conducted, one examines upper secondary school pupils’ views of engineering students and the other the societal and cultural production of the engineering student in a recruitment campaign for KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Few earlier studies have examined the messages communicated in initiatives aiming to increase and broaden the recruitment of underrepresented groups to technical universities. Still, many initiatives sharing this goal are initialised in Sweden. The theoretical framework applied by discourse analysis and governmentality analysis enables a critical examination of the discursive framework surrounding the engineering student. The thesis concludes that there is a power struggle between a discourse of a contemporary technologist and a traditional technologist and that this position is exclusively but only for the most advanced engineering students, excluding BSc students as communicated by a KTH recruitment campaign.