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Spring 2026; 15 weeks; 3 credits

Instructor: Evan Thomas

This course is open to all majors -- engineers and non-engineers!

Course Information

This class will introduce you to both the history and present reality of global poverty and climate change and the new opportunities to address inequities. In this class, we will work together to learn how different professions and backgrounds can contribute to solving these global challenges.

We will also build skills together, including how to read academic literature, critique theories of global development, and conduct basic data analysis with geospatial and statistical tools.

The Engineer’s role in addressing global poverty challenges has often been confined to village and community-scale interventions, product design and development, or large-scale infrastructure design and construction. Yet despite fifty years of these approaches, over half the world’s population still lives on less than $5.50 a day, the global burden of disease in low-income countries is overwhelmingly attributable to environmental health contaminants, and climate change is already negatively affecting people in developing countries. The conventional community, product or infrastructure focuses of development engineering is insufficient to address these global drivers that perpetuate poverty.

Engineers must become activists and advocates, leveraging our professional skills and capacity to generate evidence and positive impact toward rectifying inequalities. Engineers must reject the ahistorical, technocratic and neo-colonial conceit that poverty can be solved through products or projects, or on a community scale that requires the poorest people to overcome historical and structural inequalities and injustices.

The emerging field of Global Engineering can work to identify and address these structural injustices. Global Engineering should be concerned with the unequal and unjust distribution of access to basic services such as water, sanitation, energy, food, transportation and shelter, and place an emphasis on identifying the drivers, determinants and solutions favoring equitable access. Technology development and validation, data collection and impact evaluation can contribute to evidence-based influence on policies and practice.
Global Engineering envisions a world in which everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter and infrastructure, and can live in health, dignity, and prosperity.

Course Background

The Mortenson Center at the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ promotes the role and skills of engineers in identifying and addressing the unequal and unjust distribution of access to basic services such as water, sanitation, energy, food, transportation and shelter, and place an emphasis on identifying the drivers, determinants and solutions favoring equitable access.Ìý

Though our curriculum we:

• Introduce students to the historical causes and present conditions of global inequality, and identify the opportunities and limitations of professional engineering engagement.
• Empower students and working professionals to engage in a historically contextualized, anti-imperial contribution to global engineering.
• Identify and promote the relevance and role of the engineering profession in supporting the reduction of poverty and increasing prosperity.

Expectation of Competence

• Knowledge of historical and contemporary context of global inequalities and global development poverty alleviation policies, programs, institutions, and social movements.
• Capacity to engage in applying some engineering skills toward global development
• Team Work

Expectation of Exposure

• Identification of technical interventions
• Field Readiness
• Cultural Sensitivity
• Impact Evaluation
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Global Health

Learning Goals

1. Students will identify the geopolitical and historical contexts of health and socioeconomic disparities within and between countries.
2. Students will describe global poverty reduction efforts, including historical and present-day programs, frameworks, funding agencies, and implementations.
3. Students will describe and critique technical interventions promoted to address water, sanitation, hygiene, energy, infrastructure, shelter, agricultural, and evaluation needs.
4. Students will become familiar with basic statistical and geospatial data analytical tools.
5. Students will become familiar with basic electronic design and deployment tools.

Textbooks and Materials

Hickel, Jason, "The Divide" - Required, PDF version provided through Canvas
Thomas, Evan "The Global Engineers" - Optional, PDF version provided through Canvas
All other readings provided digitally in Canvas.