2026 INES Best Paper Award

Please congratulate Kristin Bartlett for winning the 2026 INES Best Paper Award! The award committee also commends Antoine Bouzin and Marwa Koheji for their excellent papers. To select this year’s winners, the committee judged all the papers published in INES’ journal, Engineering Studies, from 2023-2025.  

Here are the committee’s comments about the winning papers: 

Kristin Bartlett received the Best Paper Award for her paper “The Politics of the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test of Rotations (PSVT:R) and its Use in Engineering Education."

Kristin Bartlett’s paper is a careful, systematic, and persuasive critique of influences that led to the current revision of the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test (PSVT:R). This instrument has been widely used in engineering education contexts because it claims to measure abilities which are considered key to success in STEM.  Barlett has traced the surprising genealogy and politics of the test’s seemingly innocuous isometric imagery, demonstrating that a little bit of theory can go a long way. Drawing on literature on the social construction of gender, her paper shows how the PSVT:R reinforces sex differences and that it was designed to do so. As such, it deftly illustrates the importance of studying things that appear neutral and, for lack of a better word, boring. The paper suggests a dual transformative potential. First, Bartlett has shown, quite elegantly, how one might examine historical research and bring out the assumptions embedded in the seemingly neutral tools used in engineering education, thus pointing to a potentially fruitful field for further study. Second, her contribution has challenged taken-for-granted tools and approaches in engineering education and thus also has the potential to transform how such education is organised. This is an important contribution to the field that raises further questions about sex, gender and engineering.

Antoine Bouzin is commended for his paper “Negotiating Engineering and Activism: French Environmentalist Engineers Conforming to, Shifting, and Overstepping Professional Boundaries.”

Antoine Bouzin’s paper provides an insight into a surprising degree of political activism and attitudes to sustainability among French engineers. He describes how they reconcile their professional activities with environmental activism. His paper combines a strong theoretical approach and perceptive analysis of fifty narrative interviews with a parallel analysis of their online interactions within the websites of social movement organizations. Most of these engineers had no formal education in environmental issues, and their interests in environmental causes arose outside their formal discipline boundaries. Working from Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, one might have expected that they “mobilize a ‘techno-scientific interpretive schema’ in their apprehension of social and political issues.” Bouzin noticed that these engineers were partly stimulated by disillusionment in their workplaces as they attempted to shift the boundaries of corporate action, and partly by talks from entrepreneurial “issue engineers” such as Jean-Marc Jancovici, Philippe Bihouix, and Valérie Masson-Delmotte. His insightful contribution shows how the boundaries between professional work and political activism are not static and respond to social movements over time.

Marwa Koheji is commended for her paper “On Cooling and Comfort: The Engineering of Thermal Spaces in Bahrain.”

Marwa Koheji’s article makes a refreshing and illuminating contribution to a time-honoured scholarly tradition of uncovering the intricate sociotechnical dynamics embedded in seemingly mundane technical arrangements, in this case, the design and deployment of air-conditioning for indoor cooling. Through a compelling examination of the unequal negotiations that have shaped standards of thermal comfort in Bahrain, the author challenges conventional understandings of cooling technology, revealing how these standards emerge from the interplay of colonial histories, cross-cultural imaginaries, and, crucially, the practical considerations that guide engineers in their everyday work.