I have just returned from Woods Hole, Massachusetts near Martha's Vineyard, where I participated in a four day workshop run by Peter Taylor (UMASS-Boston).  In the New England Workshop on Science and Social Change, I learned several activities that can help bring about open spaces for dialogue, creative exploration of ideas, and collaborative planning, with the potential of inclusion and empowerment of many diverse participants.  I believe that we all came away thinking the experience was very positive. While I found the experience to be very emotionally charged, and thus 'risky', I am also coming back from it excited about the tools that we used and how effective they seemed.  I am interested in the potential of such tools as: autobiographical introductions, free-writing, theatre therapy, figure/ground diagramming, narrative therapy, etc. to name a few.
I hope to use such tools to encourage critical thinking among engineering undergraduate students, especially mechanical engineers.

I am so excited that the triple session that Tolu, Kevin, Denver and I have worked on has been accepted at the Society for the Social Studies of Science annual meeting in November 2011!  Cleveland Rocks!
We have a spectacular line-up of scholarly work, please see the abstracts here, 
Here is the KFM triple session abstract:
Knowledge from the margins is of longstanding interest to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Modern technoscientific knowledge is typically understood to be produced for patent, profit, and/or its liberal virtues. The early focus on innovative knowledge resulted primarily in elite histories of Western (typically male and Caucasian) technologists and scientists going through the frustrations and satisfactions of life in laboratories. However, such studies begged the question, where does this knowledge go, what does it do, and for whom? Later STS scholars often explored this question from the point of view of those in 'the margins' who are: peripheral to modern knowledge production (e.g. civil society organizations, laypersons); 'lacking' modern knowledge production (e.g. non-Western, indigenous); or excluded from modern knowledge production (e.g. female, minority, disabled).
This triple session will demonstrate how a theoretical focus on knowledge from the margins resists typical ways of conceptualizing producers, users and innovation, and radicalizes thinking about institutional change. Part I will topically focus on 'sciences from below' and how they question assumptions about the knowledge production process that are common to Western societies. Part II will demonstrate how perturbing the user/producer boundary resists typical ways of thinking about the design and consumption of information and communications technologies.  Part III will discuss how modern ideologies of technocracy and/or neoliberalism shape local knowledge and, conversely, allow for local knowledge to challenge expert regulation. STS and other scholars in women's studies,geography, political sociology of science, and sociology of technology will be interested in this session.