Emerging+Narratives+EF

MEMO: Emerging Narratives (From the 3 Literature Sections)

Discourse of Making, Critical Making, Making as Political Act: The practices of 'making' and DIY culture have a long history deeply embedded in tinkering practices and craft culture. In their more recent iterations, these two hand-in-hand terms have a particular foundation in hackerspaces -- which bring like-minded individuals together to perform more subversive re-use and re-mixing of technologies. These practices work not only to empower the individual, but often to bring what might be thought of as proprietary software or hardware into the use of the community, and then through word of mouth or documentation, the greater community at large (although still possibly limited by limited visibility of these subversive groups.) This generation and dissemination of skills and knowledge proliferated with the advent of the digital age, as maker and hacker communities could now easily share their life "hacks" with the greater global community. Yet as the movement grew and expanded to what many call the "maker movement" it began to shed it's subversive roots in many circles and started to take on a more mainstream, entrepreneur goal-oriented bent. Certainly this trend of makers becoming innovators had always been an undercurrent of the subversive movement, but the overall ethos had still been more anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalistic -- 'making' to subvert the system. Current emergent trends demonstrate that 'making' has now //become// the system.

Lay Expertise and Citizen Science This proliferation of knowledge that is open and free among like-minded individuals blends in well to the goal of civic science and the use of lay expertise to design pertinent research questions and in turn acquire and analyze relevant knowledge for vested communities affected by a particular scientific or technological development. Often, lay experts will acquire their knowledge through situational circumstances (life), work or even play. Often the particular knowledge of geographic locale and sensitivity toward a certain topic can give lay-people a particular (or situated) knowledge that may often go overlooked, but is key to fully understand an issue or resolving a problem (Wynne, Epstein). One might consider how critial making and praxis help to further civic science agendas away from the trajectory of 'making' as an entrepreneurial practice focused on local innovation?

Material Agency and Embodiment Material agency and the network of actors/actants involved within these issues is very interesting, as the very act of 'making' has a transformative effect on not only the object in hand, but the individual who creates as well (Pickering). When considering makerspaces, there is an interesting implication in terms of embodiment as the practitioners themselves embody the tensions of a shift from subversive and community-oriented making toward entrepreneurial individualistic innovation practices with a mindset toward capitalistic gains.