Safe and secure water is a cornerstone of modern life in the global North. This article critically examines a set of prevalent myths about household water in high-income countries, with a focus on Canada and the United States. Taking a relational approach, we argue that household water insecurity is a product of institutionalized structures and power, manifests unevenly through space and time, and is reproduced in places we tend to assume are the most water-secure in the world. We first briefly introduce "modern water" and the modern infrastructural ideal, a highly influential set of ideas that have shaped household water provision and infrastructure development over the past two centuries. Against this backdrop, we consolidate evidence to disrupt a set of narratives about water in high-income countries: the notion that water access is universal, clean, affordable, trustworthy, and uniformly or equitably governed. We identify five thematic areas of future research to delineate an agenda for advancing scholarship and actionincluding challenges of legal and regulatory regimes, the housing-water nexus, water affordability, and water quality and contamination. Data gaps underpin the experiences of household water insecurity. Taken together, our review of water security for households in high-income countries provides a conceptual map to direct critical research in this area for the coming years.

What if social justice were a core value for engineers? Is it possible, or desirable, to canonize social justice in a professional code? In this thought experiment, we borrow directly from the ethics code of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), for whom social justice is a core value, as well as prior work of scholars in the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace community (esjp.org), to generate and explore new values, principles, and standards that reflect social justice aspirations for engineers. The following six principles will be explored:• Engineers' primary goal is to help people in need and to address social problems • Engineers challenge social injustice • Engineers practice cultural and epistemic humility • Engineers respect the dignity and worth of each person • Engineers recognize the central importance of human relationships • Engineers seek to live in peace with their individual selves, others, and the planet.These are meant to exist alongside values and principles expressed in current engineering ethics canons.We begin with a discussion of the lack of a central social good to which engineers aspire as a profession, and the inadequacies of public paramountcy as an aspirational vision. We argue that engineers do need such a vision, and propose social justice be adopted as this vision's foundational component. The proposed engineering ethics canons center on social justice and include articulation of values, statements of principles, and elaboration of standards. We conclude with a discussion motivating social justice as a value that all engineers can adopt.

Lead is the most prevalent toxicant in U. S. school drinking water. Yet for the vast majority of schools, federal regulation for testing taps and remediating contamination is voluntary. Using school case studies, this article discusses the regulatory vacuum that leaves children unprotected from potential exposure to very high lead doses through consumption of school water. Controlling lead hazards from water fountains, coolers, and other drinking water outlets in schools requires improved sampling protocols that can capture the inherent variability of lead release from plumbing and measure both the particulate and dissolved lead present in water. There is a need to reevaluate the potential public health implications of lead-contaminated drinking water in schools. Accounting for this misunderstood and largely overlooked exposure source is necessary in order to better understand and address childhood lead poisoning in the U. S.

This paper presents results from a content analysis of foundational engineering documents with respect to characterizations of the relationship between engineering and "the public." Fourteen documents were reviewed, including National Academy of Engineering (NAE) reports, ABET accreditation criteria, disciplinary "Bodies of Knowledge," engineering codes of ethics, and organizational/programmatic brochures of leading entities in Learning Through Service (LTS). These documents were selected as repositories of the engineering profession's identity, vision, ambition, and perceived relationship with society. The purpose of the analysis was to identify manifest and latent messages about the engineering profession's institutionally sanctioned imaginaries of "the public."Guided by a theoretical framework of social imaginaries, three reviewers used qualitative data analysis to identify prevalent themes in how the engineering profession tends to conceptualize "the public." Ninety-nine codes were developed and were broadly divided into six themes: characterizations of "the public," professional duties related to "the public," relationship between engineers and "the public," societal problems in need of engineering solutions, engineers' "social footprint" over time, and vision or mission statements. The most prevalent theme identified overall characterized engineers as benefitting "the public." That engineers "solve problems," and the importance of building or sustaining engineers' professional image in the eye of "the public," were also commonly discussed. Predominant characterizations of "the public" were as members of "developing" countries (e.g., economically, technologically, in terms of industrial capacity and/or sustainable engagement with the environment) and as "lacking information" (e.g., about engineers or what engineers do).These results are part of a larger study about engineers' imaginaries of "the public" and how these imaginaries might influence the ways engineers see themselves and approach their work, the problems they attempt to solve, and the diverse publics they aim to serve. By examining dominant messages in these documents, as well as noticing absent messages, we can begin to understand the ideologies that inform the critical but often elusive boundary that engineers raise between their profession and society. As such, our analysis constitutes a first step toward deeper insight into how the engineering profession's identity vis-à-vis "the public" might enhance or weaken engineering practice and, ultimately, how it might support or undermine the profession's aspiration to promote the social good.

Virginia Tech. For the past 7 years, she has conducted research on the historic 2001-2004 Washington, DC lead-in-drinking-water contamination. This work exposed wrongdoing and unethical behavior on the part of local and federal government agencies. In 2010, Dr. Lambrinidou co-conceived the graduate level engineering ethics course "Engineering Ethics and the Public." She is co-PI on a National Science Foundation (NSF) research and education project developing an ethnographic approach to engineering ethics education.