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It is widely argued that engineering education needs to change in order to attract new groups of students and provide students with knowledge appropriate for the future society. In this paper we, therefore, investigate and analyse Swedish universities' websites, focusing on what characteristics are brought to the fore as important for tomorrow's engineers. The data consist of text and pictures/photos from nine different Engineering Mechanics programme websites. Using a critical discourse analysis approach, we identify three societal discourses concerning 'technological progression', 'sustainability', and 'neoliberal ideals', evident in the websites. These discourses make certain engineering identities possible, that we have labelled: traditional, contemporary, responsible, and self-made engineer. Our analysis shows that universities' efforts to diversify students' participation in engineering education simultaneously reveal stereotypical norms concerning gender and age. We also argue that strong neoliberal notions about the self-made engineer can derail awareness of a gendered, classed, and racialized society.

During decades of change in the Western higher education sector, new ways of understanding academic work have reinforced notions of the impact of social capital. The present study investigates researchers' experiences of their own career making within two areas of Education Sciences in Swedish higher education: Childhood Studies (CS) and Science Education (SE). The structure at the CS departments is collaborative and integrated; teaching and research are seen as an entity. This structure creates a coherent career path where members of the collective group jointly produce and accumulate social capital; it also appears to be related to discourses of femininity. In the SE departments, the career structure is strategic and differentiated; the two career paths work in parallel through a differentiation between teaching and research. This appears to be related to discourses of masculinity.In conclusion, our analysis shows how social capital and gender mutually create different ways of doing an academic career. ARTICLE HISTORY

Background: Research in engineering education has pointed to the need for new engineers to develop a broader skillset with an emphasis on "softer" social skills. However, there remains strong tensions in the identity work that engineers must engage in to balance the technical demands of the discipline with the new emphasis on heterogeneous skills (Faulkner, Social Studies of Science 37:331-356, 2007). This study explores how three unconventional students experience these tensions in the final year of their construction engineering program, and as they move in and out of workplace field experiences. Results: Using a figured worlds framework (Holland et al., Identity and agency in cultural worlds, 1998), we explore the dominant subject positions for students in construction engineering classroom and workplaces in a 3-year Swedish engineering program. Results demonstrate that dominant subject positions for construction engineers can trouble students' identity work as they move across classroom and workplace settings.Conclusions: This study expands our knowledge of the complexity of students' identity work across classroom and workplace settings. The emergence of classroom and workplace masculinities that shape the dominant subject positions available to students are shown to trouble the identity work that students engage in as they move across these learning spaces. We examine students' identity strategies that contribute to their persistence through the field. Finally, we discuss implications for teaching and research in light of students' movements across these educational contexts.

In this article, we explore the identity work done by four male, working-class students who participate in a Swedish mechanical engineering program, with a focus on their participation in project work. A focus on how individuals negotiate their participation in science and technology disciplines has proven to be a valuable way to study inclusion and exclusion in such disciplines. This is of particular relevance in engineering education where it is widely argued that change is needed in order to attract new groups of students and provide students with knowledge appropriate for the future society. In this study we conceptualized identity as socially and discursively produced, and focus on tracing students' identity trajectories. The empirical data consists of ethnographic field notes from lectures, video-recordings of project work, semi-structured interviews, and video-diaries recorded by the students. The findings show that even though all four students unproblematically associate with the 'technicist' masculinity of their chosen program it takes considerable work to incorporate the project work into their engineering trajectories. Further, 'laddish' masculinities re/produced in higher education in engineering also contribute to a 'troubled' identity trajectory for one of the interviewed students.