Re-Tooling the Sisterhood: Conceptualizing 'Meaningful Making' through Maker Culture, Makerspace Politics, and Feminist 'little m' making-as-activism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hacktivism! Craftivism! DIY Feminism!The Maker Movement!In this dissertation, I unpack how certain Do-It-Yourself (DIY) practices have transformed from simple personal pastimes to meaningful sites for activism.To do so, I analyze three overlapping discursive terrains that I contend imbue DIY practices with a sense of 'meaningfulness'-which I term embodied materialism, critical making, and making as communication.I contend that all three of these terrains co-constitute making-as-activism identities, 'real-world' maker activist communities (makerspaces), and the wider makingas-activism network (Maker Culture).However, this blending of 'meaningful making' discourses is not evenly distributed, nor is it without contradictory logics and practices.Therefore, in this dissertation I analyze both mainstream (hegemonic) and countercultural (non-hegemonic) narratives of Maker Culture, makerspaces, maker identities, and making-as-activism.Through this multi-sided and multi-sited approach, I discovered that both hegemonic and non-hegemonic discourses co-produce the definitional boundary-work around 'what counts' as making-as-activism.Furthermore, I also contend that in using 'success narratives' and 'passionate work', the work/labour involved in producing Maker Culture are entangled in neoliberal logics-like empowerment and entrepreneurialism-which reproduces invisible structures of privilege within makerspaces.I also analyze how DIY politics and makerspace community-building have been adapted by Canadian feminist makers.Using interview data and my own experiences, I argue that feminist makers are building a non-hegemonic representation of Maker Culture by broadening what making-as-activism looks like, who does it, and how it intersects with holistic critical pedagogies.However, despite using a more reflective critical maker approach, I also discovered that feminist making and makerspaces can also re-produce many of the same contradictory logics that are found in mainstream, hegemonic Maker Culture.In concluding this work, I re-evaluate making-as-activism practices, identities, and communities within the context of the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic.I conclude that collective care approaches are vital for building healthy communities-including makerspaces-and that joint responsibility can untangle some of the contradictory messiness that comes with leading an activist life in this contemporary moment.iii Dedication For my parents, Lorraine Radke and Tom Ring, who instilled in me the value of tenacity.And for my beloved dog Baxter (August 21, 2010 -October 29, 2020), who showed me the benefits of walks in fresh air and well-deserved cookie breaks.7 Hackerspaces.org,"List of Hackerspaces", last visited 9 October 2020:
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".