Ellen Foster
RPI
Blank Line
The excitement around the ‘Maker movement’ and its possibilities for economic, educational and innovation development are well-placed. The White House recently declared June 18th the National Day of Making, the Maker Education Initiative is working to bring maker practices to schools, and libraries are also looking to initiate their own maker labs. But despite a goal of inclusiveness, implicit barriers in terms of gender, race and class perpetuate in hackerspaces and makerspaces alike. Meanwhile, overarching making and hacking practices often fail to critically reflect on how their innovations answer: for whom, by whom and for what purpose? Delineating these failings, several scholars point to hegemonic norms that shape maker cultures and often reinforce consumerist trends and dominant practices in technology development and use (Morozov 2012; Nascimento 2014). What this paper seeks to tease out of this top-down, and often corporate, discourse, are on-the-ground activities that subvert the dominant rhetoric, questioning a lack of politics by actively reflecting on accessibility, situated learning, and situated knowledges. Analyzing these actions through a feminist lens (D.E. Smith; Haraway; Toupin) questions also arise around the valuation of some forms of labor and production over others. Taking from Michel de Certeau’s work on everyday life actions as tactics, this paper explores particular communities within the ‘Maker movement’, such as Fixers, Feminist hackers and makerspaces situated in libraries, that are employing humanities, social science, and political-economy critique. How are these particular groups examining and further producing marginalized knowledges that could contribute in positive ways to making, design, engineering, and education writ large? Pushing forward how might Science and Technology Studies and a critical arts practice further contribute, inform, and shape maker activities with the recognition that artifacts and the structural mechanisms that produce them do indeed have politics?