Beyond the Makerspace: Making and Relational Rhetorics
Ann Shivers-McNair, "Beyond the Makerspace: Making and Relational Rhetorics "
English | ISBN: 0472054856 | 2021 | 158 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0472054856 | 2021 | 158 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
Makerspaces—local workshops that offer access to and training on fabrication technologies, often with a focus on creativity, education, and entrepreneurship—proliferated in the 2010s, popping up in cities across the world. Beyond the Makerspace is a longitudinal, ethnographically informed study of a particular Seattle makerspace that begins in 2015 and ends with the closing of the space in 2018. Examining acts of making with objects, tools, words, and relationships, Beyond the Makerspace reads making as a kind of rhetoric, or meaning-making work, and argues that acts of making things are rhetorical in the sense that they are culturally situated and that they mark boundaries of what counts as making and who counts as maker. By focusing on a particular makerspace over time, Shivers-McNair attends to a changing cohort of makerspace regulars as they face challenges of bringing their vision of inclusivity and diversity to fruition, and offers an examination of how makers are made (and unmade, and remade) in a makerspace.
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