Mass Media as a Discursive Resource and the Construction of Engineering Selves

Consumption Approach to Science, Technology, and Mass Media

While some qualitative approaches to the relations between media and science focus on the production of media, others focus on the consumption of media. The cultural anthropologist Hugh Gusterson’s (2004) ethnographic investigation of nuclear weapons scientists employed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory supplies an example of this approach. As part of his field work, Gusterson followed scientists outside the lab and into their living rooms where they watched movies. Gusterson treats his experience watching films with an informant named Ray as an opportunity to learn about the culture of weapons science. He reports that he learned how complex and contradictory the culture of weapons science could be. Watching the film Short Circuit with Ray, Gusterson learns just how different his interpretation of the film was from that of Ray. Where Gusterson sees messages about a destructive military that cannot be trusted, naïve scientists whose work is misused by the military, and ability of activist women to bring them to their senses, Ray practically sees a different movie. Ray viewed Short Circuit as “a technological fantasy mocking popular fears of technology and celebrating the possibility that machines might be alive, magical, and essentially harmless” (Gusterson, 2004, p. 58). While this interpretation may seem expected from a scientist because it mocks nonscientists, Gusterson (2004) is quick to show how nuclear science culture is also contradictory. Watching the film Splash with Ray, Gusterson chats with Ray and learns that films can also be interpreted by members in ways that raise questions or doubts about the dominant discourses informing nuclear science. Watching how a mermaid character and her human lover interact in the film, Ray describes another film called Starman he has seen recently, and then compares the characters to the people in his own life, saying, “The scientists in the film remind me of the attitude of some of the scientists you see in the lab, doing things without being alive to the human consequences” (Gusterson, 2004, p. 59).

The cultural anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (1998) has also explored how scientists consume mass media. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with scientists and engineers involved in the field of “Artificial Life,” Helmreich suggests that these knowledge workers use science fiction to construct computers as worlds. Adherents of the field are interested in constructing computers as worlds because they are interested in developing a “universal biology,” a biology robust enough to learn something about life across the universe. Limited by the extraordinary costs of studying life on other planets, Artificial Life researchers rely on computers to try and simulate what life may be like on these other planets. Informed by this emerging discipline, Helmreich suggests that researchers use science fiction in several ways. First, the use of science fiction is related to the life course. Older scientists, Helmreich says, make little use of science fiction. The researchers who came of age during or after the 1960s are the ones who make use of science fiction, referring Helmreich (1998) to science fiction writing where some kind of entity imagines itself a God and creates an artificial world. Second, the science fiction stories they do invoke are highlighted for the Judeo-Christian Creation myths they describe. Third, researchers reasoned that since they do not have the ability to use Star Trek’s USS Enterprise to study life on other planets, they can rely on computers to learn about Artificial Life. Helmreich points out that the selection of these themes in science fiction is compatible with westward expansion, the American frontier cultural history, and cowboy stories. Fourth, Helmreich argues that Artificial Life researchers strive for a science fiction writer self in some ways. Like the science fiction writer authoring a future world through words, the Artificial Life researcher works to build an artificial world with computers. Helmreich describes a scientist who constructed himself as a storyteller, and who was understood by some as an artist as a means of emphasizing how these researchers draw on science fiction to construct their lives. Finally, Helmreich points out how much of the science fiction genre the researchers left out in their references. He writes that the researchers referred to the science fiction concerned with robots, outer space, and colonization while ignoring science fiction that proposed alternative views of gender, sexuality, species, and life. And so the feminist and queer science fiction penned by Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delaney, Marge Piercy, and Joanna Russ was not referenced by researchers.

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was a NASA mission devoted to sending robots to Mars in order to study Mars. And Zara Mirmalek’s (2009) fieldwork with the scientists and engineers who composed the MER team provides another study that analyzes the relations between science and media. The members of MER went about their work of sending data collection commands to the robots according to Mars time, which meant that everyday team members moved their clocks forward 39.6 minutes in order to synchronize with Mars time. This posed a number of challenges for team members such as sharing changes in meeting times. Mirmalek reports that the formal technologies provided by NASA’s organizational infrastructure were inadequate for this task. And although this organizational infrastructure had a hand in this problem, Mirmalek found that team members did not formally notify specialists and superiors of this challenge. MER team members did not even explicitly view these challenges as work breakdowns that could be addressed with formal infrastructural or organizational improvements in time-keeping arrangements. MER team members instead individualized these temporal challenges and viewed them as marks of valor. Mirmalek, then, poses the question why did team members view their temporal challenges in this way rather than other ways? She suggests that members use of media as “explanatory devices” for normative work and identity provides one account. There are many different kinds of media that supply stories and images about NASA and space exploration, including film, TV shows, news stories, and science fiction literature. And these media typically highlight an individual’s ability to overcome organizational, political, and technical adversities. The ability to do this is also celebrated as valuable and heroic. Mirmalek (2009) adds that MER team members consumed these media, and used them in the workplace to explain their influences, quote lines and dialogue from movies, joke with each other, and to name features of the Martian terrain. And team members explained that their influences included authors such as Issac Assimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Jules Verne. Team members also quoted lines from movies like Apollo 13, Star Wars, and Ghostbusters.

The consumption approach to media suffers from an important problem. It analyzes mass media in terms of its content. In doing so, it emphasizes what has been called “discourse-in-practice” (Cousineau, 2013; Foucault, 1977; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). Discourse-in-practice refers to shared stocks of knowledge that supply us with representations and practices. Whether the knowledge and representations have to do with the conventional or unconventional themes of a genre (Helmreich, 1998) or a hero character’s action (Mirmalek, 2009), this approach only analyzes discourse-in-practice. It does not analyze the everyday, practical, concrete, and “seen but unnoticed” procedures people bring to bear on discourse-in-practice.

In this article, I aim to highlight the everyday, practical, concrete, and seen-but-unnoticed interactional work of making sense of mass media. This work can be viewed as “discursive practice” (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000), the practical and interactional activities through which people use discourse-in-practice. And when a discourse-in-practice is used by people in the course of some concrete, everyday activity, it is effectively transformed into a discursive resource.

In this article, I build on Gusterson’s (2004) ethnographic approach to media by analyzing the discursive practices of lab members. After a discussion of the methods of the larger study from which this article is drawn, I analyze a discursive practice called “benchmarking,” which uses mass media as reference points to mark a speaker’s growing alignment with the profession of electrical and computer engineering. Next, I turn to the discursive practices used in explaining experiences with religious texts and videos, including pointing out the limits of religious texts and using a folk theory of metaphor. And finally, I describe a discursive practice that attends to media technologies themselves and repurposes them for lab research projects.

Method

I draw on data collected during the course of an ethnographic study of an academic engineering research laboratory. The methods for this study are more fully described elsewhere (Cousineau, 2014b). And so for the purposes of this article, I will point out a few things to provide a sense of the setting and its people. The study itself was made up of participation observation in the lab and in a robotics course as well as open-ended interviews with lab members, engineering students, and lab associates. This included 2 years of participant observation and 43 interviews.

I call the academic engineering research lab I studied EARL, a pseudonym for Engineering and Research Lab-oratory. All lab members in this article are also described with pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity. The human members of EARL included lab members and lab associates. Lab associates is a term I use to describe people associated with the lab, but who are not officially “lab members.” These were typically researchers from other offices or labs that collaborated with EARL members on research projects. Among lab members were the lab’s director—a man I call Dr. DaSilva, graduate students, and undergraduate students. In this article, it is good enough to describe something about the lab members I refer to. DaSilva was a 50-something PhD in engineering and a practicing Catholic. During the period of my study, DaSilva spent less time than other members in the lab. Instead, he could be found in the classroom teaching, working on grant applications in his office, attending meetings with other researchers, and writing research papers for conferences and journals.

The graduate students, on the other hand, spent lots of time in the lab. When they were up against deadlines for conferences or class, they sometimes worked 12 hours or more during the week days. They ranged in age from mid-20s to early 30s, were all non-White, exhibited a range of spiritual commitments from practicing Catholics to agnostics, and they had all recently immigrated to the United States. Juan was a key informant for me. He was born and raised in Guatemala, was working on a PhD in electrical and computer engineering during the time of the study, and was highly respected by other lab members. Aref was another graduate student I spent a lot of time with. Born and raised in a Middle Eastern country, he was working on a Master of Science (MS) degree at the time of the study. And then there was Karthik. Born and raised in India, Karthik was also working on an MS during the time of the study.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is one kind of discursive practice wherein lab members used mass media to make sense of the chain of changes across their lives. As part of the research project that this article draws from (Cousineau, 2014a), I collected and analyzed journals from four students enrolled in a robotic vision course, and conducted four interviews with each of them during the course of the semester. And during the interviews, two of these students used the mass media discourse-in-practice to describe their experience in the course and their views of robotics. One way students did this was by using the mass media discourse-in-practice to mark a change in how they understood robots. The mass media, then, was used to engage in “benchmarking,” a social process where people establish reference points in order to make sense of their life course (Gubrium, Rittman, Williams, Young, & Boylstein, 2003). In the beginning of the semester, when they had little experience working on robots, students reported one way of viewing robots. But by the end of the semester, their view had shifted. For example, an excerpt from an interview conducted early in the semester with Nate illustrates this:

By the end of the semester, Nate’s view of robots had shifted. An excerpt from an end of the semester interview I conducted with Nate demonstrates this:

Nate reports that his experience in the robotic vision course had transformed how he viewed robots. Near the beginning of the semester, Nate spoke of the “humanoid robots of the movies” when he heard the word “robots.” But during the robotics course he took that I also sat in on, Nate reports that he gained experiences that changed his view of robots. He no longer immediately considers the humanoid robots depicted in many movies.

While I asked Nate if the humanoid robots of the movies were still the first thing that comes to his mind, there is much more going on here than a simple word association exercise. Gubrium et al. (2003) have shown how stroke survivors engage in benchmarking in order to make sense of their recovery. While it may seem odd to compare stroke survivors to the members of an engineering lab, I suggest they have something in common because they both participate in a general social process. The process of benchmarking includes designating reference points and applying them to attend to differences across time. Lab members engaged in the same general process, but instead of using it to make sense of stroke recovery, they used it to make sense of how they had changed as persons through their experiences in the class. And they did this by designating knowledge of robotics as benchmarks in their lives.

Nate’s account of why his view of robots changed and the alignment of his current view with the profession of electrical and computer engineering demonstrate how self comes into play. Nate uses the mass media discourse-in-practice to construct an engineer self. In the excerpt above, Nate does this in two ways. First, he explains that now he considers industrial, mobile, and stationary robotics first because they were the “type of robots we worked with in the class.” This helps Nate construct an engineer self by furnishing him with an opportunity to draw attention to his firsthand experience and knowledge working on robots. Second, Nate recalls that this was his first experience working on an “arm type robot system.” But rather than leave it at that, he describes what he has learned by saying that the kinds of robots he worked on are “very common.” This assists Nate in constructing an engineer self by supplying him with an opportunity to showcase some knowledge he has gained. Third, Nate contrasts the mobile, stationary, and industrial robots of the class with movie robots. Nate concludes from this comparison that the mobile, stationary, and industrial robots he gained experience working on are “more realistic” than movie robots. The mass media are used by some lab members to construct an engineer self. For student engineers, this works when students provide descriptions and explanations of robots that are in alignment with the electrical and computer engineering profession. And since engineers often celebrate hands-on experience and knowledge of how common the technologies they work on are, Nate’s own words align him with the electrical and computer engineering profession.

Interpreting Religious Texts

The ubiquity of contemporary forms of mass media can pose a problem for scholars of science, technology, and mass media. Encountering TV shows, movies, video games, newspapers, magazines, and music, it is easy to forget that some of the oldest mass media are religious texts. In this section, I describe the discursive practices lab members brought to bear on the discourse-in-practice of religion. The discourse-in-practice of religion supplies knowledge about stories and characters in religious texts like the Bible and the Koran. The following account is drawn largely from my dissertation research (Cousineau, 2014a). While the cultural resources available for making sense of media can include many different things, a very common resource is the “motive.” According to the sociologist C. Wright Mills (1940), motives are reasons, explanations, excuses, and justifications for chosen courses of action that social actors use to satisfy themselves and others. In the case of lab members, they relied on what the sociologist Shane Sharp (2009) has called “transforming motives,” which “. . . change nongroup motives into motives that conform to the culture of social groups . . .” (p. 268). Lab members offered a transforming motive when they worked to make sense of religious texts, and this interpretive strategy enabled them to construct an engineer self. They did this by aligning the lab members’ approach to the religious text with things that are valued in engineering culture such as science, evolution, and literature reviews.

A common way lab members rendered a religious text compatible with science or evolution involved calling attention to the limits of a religious text. And this was accomplished in two ways: by applying a folk theory of metaphor to religious texts and by specifying an omission in a text. A folk theory of metaphor is a theory developed by group members of what counts as metaphor. Interpreting some things in the bible as metaphorical and others as not is useful for lab members because it provides them with a means of communicating that some bible passages do not represent historical or evolutionary events without discrediting the bible as a whole as inaccurate or revisionist. Treating some bible passages as metaphor is especially effective at doing this work because treating some passages as metaphor enables lab members to communicate that some passages are not literal representations of history or evolution, but rather analogies that are better understood as stories about the authority of God. In an interview, DaSilva talked at length about treating the story of Adam and Eve as metaphor. An excerpt from an interview we did illustrates this:

It is noteworthy here that among the voluminous stories the bible offers, DaSilva chose this story to treat as metaphor. The story of Adam and Eve he refers to is the Abrahamic origin story which suggests that Adam and Eve were the first man and first woman, that these humans were created by God, and that all other humans are descended from these two people. Since this origin story ignores the Big Bang and evolution in favor of a creation by God, it is incompatible with the chief scientific account of history. And so the lab director works to make the Adam and Eve passage compatible with science by treating the Adam and Eve story as a metaphor for the moral risks of playing God and breaking rules rather than a literal representation of the first humans.

Juan also relied on this strategy in an interview we did. Juan told me that the creation passages in the bible should be understood as metaphors. An excerpt from an interview shows how he did this:

Note how Juan works to make the creationist passages of the bible compatible with evolution by suggesting that “. . . it’s just a metaphorical way of viewing the, the creation and everything.” Juan interprets the bible’s story of creation as metaphor. It is “just” a metaphor. It is not a literal representation of the development of the “universe” and humans. For Juan, God “. . . made it possible for a collision in the, ah, the whole creation, and again, the evolution of the universe.” This renders the bible compatible with science by suggesting that although God may not have literally created humans directly, this does not mean he had no role. Instead, God makes it possible for the Big Bang, which creates the universe, and then evolution takes over. In Juan’s narrative, God sets things in motion by making the Big Bang possible, and this invites roles for both evolution and God in a way that makes them compatible with each other.

Another interpretive strategy lab members relied on involved approaching religious texts as literature reviews. Rather than committing to views espoused in a particular religious text, by the author of a particular religious text, or by a specific religious leader, this strategy places religious texts in a framework where they can be compared with other religious texts and authors. And in adopting a comparative approach to interpreting religious texts, engineers gain an opportunity to perform objectivity because they can emphasize their detachedness from the views espoused in any particular religious text or by any particular religious author, and therefore appear more interested in Truth than commitment to any specific religious dogma, text, or author. An excerpt from an interview I did with Karthik illustrates how he approaches religious texts and authors as a literature review. Karthik was interested in religion and spiritualism, but was also skeptical of it. His background included attending Hindu temple with his father while growing up in India, and adopting his father’s habit of reading religious texts written by religious authors and “gurus.” Like his father, Karthik also learned to supplement his religious readings with religious talk. He told me he talked about Islam and Hindu with friends and neighbors. An excerpt from an interview we did illustrates how Karthik approaches religious texts:

Karthik works to make sense of rebirth by comparing Hindu texts with Buddhist visual texts. When he learns that Hinduism includes rebirth and Buddhism does not, he uses it as an opportunity to learn more about each religion’s texts rather than immediately passing judgment on one as right and the other as wrong. He calls this process of learning more as he “gets time” to study these texts a process that “critically” analyzes religious texts “rather than accept what is written there.” Karthik says that assuming one religion is right about rebirth amounts to a “bias,” and so comparisons shield him from bias. Then near the end of his narrative, Karthik explicitly links this comparative approach to the approach adopted in “science” and “sociology. He points out that when one religious author writes one text and another writes a different text, these texts can be interpreted by comparing their conclusions, and so religious texts can be approached as literature reviews because they both involve reading literature and comparing conclusions. Making sense of religious texts is the same as writing a literature review for an article. And literature reviews are rarely out of mind for Karthik and the lab members: they write them to summarize and make sense of previous research that relates to their research projects, and they write literature reviews for class projects and Masters and PhD research.

By articulating his interest in religious texts in terms of a comparative approach, Karthik calls attention to his commitment to this approach rather than any specific religious text, dogma, or author. And this detachment from the views espoused in any particular religious text, dogma, or by any particular author enables him to perform a kind of objectivity where he appears more interested in “critically” analyzing the claims of each text or author in search of Truth rather than an unquestioning acceptance of one particular text.

Repurposing Media Technologies

The historian and science studies scholar David Kirby (2011) conducted a study of scientists who consult on movie production projects. He found that these science consultants work to incorporate their visions of future science and technology into movies and that this helps them generate funding for their projects and helps them construct the real-world version of the prototype depicted in the movie. In contrast to this view of people using media to depict the unbuilt and/or unknown future as a way of promoting their own interests, EARL lab members discussed currently available technologies with each other and me in ways that currently, or in the future, promoted their own interests. Describing these already built technologies provided a means of promoting their own interests by supplying lab members with an opportunity structure for exploring research opportunities. Lab members selected for attention the technologies that made it possible for mass media to be produced, distributed, and consumed. And they talked about these technologies as sources of “solutions” for electrical and computer engineering problems.

Lab members regularly watched TV shows, movies, and network TV broadcast sporting events such as professional soccer matches. These forms of mass media feature many parts, including characters, TV personalities, players, coaches, stories, metaphors, and colors. However, lab members very rarely talked about these things for more than a moment. Instead, the things they talked about at length to each other and to me were the technologies that made it possible for these media to be produced, distributed, and consumed. They considered how these technologies could be repurposed for lab research projects (Molotch & McClain, 2008). They did this by linking media depictions of technology with current lab research projects, or by linking them with possible future research projects.

I begin with references to current lab research projects. A high-dollar, multi-authored National Science Foundation grant application had consumed much of DaSilva’s time and energy for some time. The grant described a team effort to send robots and machines onto farms to phenotype plants. During a tour of the lab for a prospective lab member, DaSilva described this project to a student interested in joining EARL. In my field notes, I recalled:

DaSilva describes the quadcopter [remotely operated helicopter with 4 propeller-driven engines] project as an effort to phenotype plants and produce 3-D models of corn or soybeans. He says that the quadcopter would hover over a field and collect data, which could then be used to direct robots on the ground where to go. He says there would be small robots in the fields, bigger robots along the vehicular access roads of the fields, and then a Spidercam overhead. DaSilva describes the Spidercam as similar to the camera used by the NFL to get close shots of the line of scrimmage. The camera, he says, travels over the football field on a network of cables, and they may also apply this system to farm fields if they get NSF funding.

DaSilva suggests that the “Spidercam” would help coordinate the robots working together to phenotype plants. The Spidercam, he says, would be like the cameras used by the NFL, or National Football League to get up-close shots of the line of scrimmage. DaSilva then adds that the Spidercam itself could be used over farm fields irrespective of the other robots. What I want to call attention to here is the features of the media that are selected for attention by lab members. These mass media include many features that people can select. Movies feature characters, dialogue, monologue, lighting, shots, graphics, and metaphors. Football games broadcast by TV networks exhibit players, coaches, fans, commercials, and competition. But rather than selecting any of these features to talk about, or describing these media in ways that make the speaker sound like a football fan, lab members select a pattern of features. They select the technology itself and foreground how the technology is used to try and solve a problem in their discussions. Lab members, then, foreground a means—end rationality in their uses of mass media. This is noteworthy because it shows how they use mass media to perform an engineering self. Displaying knowledge of technology depicted in mass media and how it is or can be used to address some engineering problem constitutes an engineering self by displaying to listeners that the speaker has identified the features of the media relevant to engineering and/or described how these features could be used for ongoing and future lab research projects.

References to possible future research projects were more common. Perhaps this happens because immersion in the details of an ongoing research project makes it challenging to link it to mass media in some useful way. One example of this kind of reference happened to me one afternoon as Aref and I studied pictures of robots. Aref explained to me that he found the movie The Hurt Locker interesting because of the “robotics solutions” presented—the ways that it showed mobile robots deployed in war zones to identify, defuse, and manage improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Another interesting example of this kind of reference happened during the lab section of the robotics course I sat in on. During the lab for a robotics vision course he TAed for, Aref linked a movie with possible future research projects. In my field notes, I recalled:

I ask Aref if his experiences [as a student and then a TA] in the robotics vision class have led him to consider human vision. He responds that he “already had ideas” about human vision before he took the robotics vision class. He explains that he thought about human vision in the context of 3D movies. He explains that 3D movies are made with cameras that have 2 different lenses, and that these lenses are placed apart at about the same distance as human eyes on a person’s face. He gestures to his eyes with his index finger and third finger on his right hand as he says this. He also tells me that when he arrived in the US, one of the first things he did was go and see Harry Potter 7 in 3D in the theatre. He explains that he was eager to see a 3D movie because there are no 3D movies in the Middle Eastern country he comes from. Aref explains that they “don’t have the technology.”

At the time I posed the question above, I was interested in how experiences working on robotic technologies influenced views of human bodies and nature. Aref responded to my question by telling me that he “already had ideas” about human vision before his experiences as a student and TA in the robotic vision course. Specifying the shape of these learning experiences, he says that he used 3-D movie cameras as objects that are “good to think with” (Turkle, 2007). Aref then elaborated that his learning opportunity was not limited to thinking and developing ideas about the camera and how it related to human vision. He also wanted to experience the 3-D camera in action. And so he reports that he went to see the movie Harry Potter 7. It is noteworthy that he pointed out to me that it was one of the first things he did when he arrived in the United States because this casts it as a high priority, which suggests it is very important. Finally, it is important to note one final thing here. Movies can be viewed in many different ways as viewers bring different interpretations, biographies, and experiences to bear on them. Aref signals an awareness of the multiple ways his report of watching the movie could be heard, and so he explains why he was excited by saying that in his home country they “don’t have the technology.” This helps suggest that Aref should be understood as interested in the movie for technological reasons rather than alternative reasons having to do with the construction of fan or movie buff selves.

Conclusion

In this article, I have described how lab members use mass media to construct engineering selves. They do this through three discursive practices: benchmarking, interpreting religious texts and videos, and repurposing media technologies. With benchmarking, lab members constructed an engineering self by treating media depictions of technology as reference points marking their growing alignment with the profession of electrical and computer engineering. They also constructed an engineering self by offering explanations of their experiences and interactions with religious texts and videos in ways that conformed to things that were prized by other engineers: science, evolution, and literature reviews. An engineering self was also constructed through the process of repurposing media technologies. Describing the ways that media technologies could be repurposed supplied an opportunity for lab members to showcase how knowledgeable they were. They could show that they knew which features of media technologies were relevant for engineering and also show that they knew how they could be used to address some engineering problem.

In general, this study makes a substantive contribution and a theoretical contribution. Substantively, it builds on studies of how engineers construct identities. While the roles of drawing (Henderson, 1999), disciplining the body (Downey & Lucena, 1997), controlling emotions (Downey & Lucena, 1997), separating work from nonwork (Downey & Lucena, 1997), and unsettling the boundaries between humans and machines have all been explored (Downey, 1998), the role of mass media in the construction of engineering identities has been neglected. Theoretically, I have used the analytic concepts of discourse-in-practice and discursive practice in order to highlight the difference between discourse and the ways that discourse can be used in everyday life. This is an important difference to recognize because it enables us to view discourse as a resource we can use in everyday life to construct meanings. And an important theoretical lesson grows from this viewpoint. By following what people do with discourse—their discursive practices—we gain a valuable means of making visible and understanding nuanced social practices that would not be visible otherwise. For example, it provides a more complex account of two things: (1) the relations between mass media and the process of identity construction and (2) the relations between discourses that are typically assumed to conflict with each other. In terms of the first account, my analysis has shown how mass media can play a complex role in the construction of identities. It enabled lab members to describe their research, imagine its applications, and plan future research projects. But lab members also distanced themselves from it when they described how their default view of robots shifted from the humanoid robots of film to the industrial robots of engineering. And so mass media can be used to do two very different things for the self. As far as the second account, my analysis has shown how two discourses—engineering and religion—do not always conflict with each other. Like Foley and Faircloth’s (2003) point that midwifery and medicine may theoretically conflict while not always conflicting in practice, the discourses of engineering and religion do not always conflict with each other in practice. Lab members draw on the discourse of religion to construct engineering selves.