The Most Compelling Critiques of Making
Building on Chachra’s foundation, Vossoughi et al. provide more detail into the racialized, gendered, and class-based dynamics of this maker ethos and education, especially in relation to working-class students and students of color. Some (of many) valuable points argue that the mainstream maker movement deemphasizes and devalues making as social or artistic practice, or as economic survival; that making is an “adult, white, middle-class pursuit” that requires leisure time and economic resources; and romanticizes for middle- to upper-class audiences what has historically been associated with vocational training. Echoing Chachra, they caution against the “uncritical adoption” of making.2
Similarly, in a keynote address responding to a series of panels based on Chachra’s more recent piece titled, “Beyond Making,”3 Jack Halberstam suggests that the framework of unmaking and unbuilding the oppressive logics of this world may be a fruitful approach for humanities projects invested in social well-being and equity.4 Halberstam specifically cites Audre Lorde, speaking to the praxis of revolutionary politics, who warned, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”5 In these ways, advocates for making as scholarly practice must be aware of the possible repercussions of institutionalizing mainstream maker approaches, and in the case of the humanities, reimagine how (re/un)making might be incorporated into its missions, values, and ethos—and how those may be remade in the process.
Footnotes:
- Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/.
- Shirin Vossoughi, Paul A K Hooper, and Meg EscudĂ©, “Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity,” Harvard Educational Review 86, no. 2 (2016): 206–232, https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.86.2.206.
- Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 319–21.
- Jack Halberstam, “Bewilderment: Queer Theory After Nature” (Keynote Address, November 17, 2018).
- Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.