About

Welcome and greetings!

My name is ML Sugie, and this is a blog related to my fields(s) of study, academic work, and general musings about philosophy, education, engineering, technology, and anything else that catches my attention and is worth analyzing.

I was born in Tokyo, Japan and have lived in Saipan, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Oregon. This makes it awkward and difficult to describe my “hometown” or “where I grew up,” and I have habituated myself to say “Beaverton, Oregon” to avoid long explanations.

I’ve been in Corvallis for seven years, and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering at Oregon State University in June of 2006, with an Option in Microelectronics Process and Materials Science. I’m continuing my work at OSU to earn a Masters of Arts in Applied Ethics – hopefully focusing on issues related to ethics in engineering.

If you’re wondering how engineering and ethics go together, you’re not alone. It’s the most frequent question I receive after describing my field of study, probably because of the dual esoteric nature of chemical engineering and the study of ethics; they’re both treated as discrete fields whose overlap is merely one of regulation and rule obedience.

The title of this blog, “Engineering Social Justice,” is partly a play on words, but mostly serious. Engineering can describe the people who are professionals in a qualified branch of engineering, but also refers to the act of designing, building and maintaining an engine, machine or public works. Social justice is a tricky, amorphous and occasionally contradictory subject which would take much more time to explain here; suffice it to say, I believe social justice works towards co-operation by all individuals through generations, deliberative democracy, the expansion of personal agency and the reduction of harm, to the benefit of all.

I believe that to engineer social justice requires education in fields of study which support, maintain, and create spaces where social justice can be enacted. Note that I don’t believe this education is limited to academic work. Many of my own experiences around working towards social justice have involved non-academic, non-theory settings.

What I write about is as varied as what I think about: economics, philosophy, engineering, feminism, queer experience, sex, gender, education…