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Northern Ireland is emerging from a violent sectarian conflict colloquially known as The Troubles. Contested top-down peace building initiatives (Murtagh 2011, 1132) imposing socio-economic development agendas on local actors underpin approaches to change (Richmond and Mitchell 2011, 338). The following case offers an alternative perspective of the...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... mid-2013, the successful crowdfunding of a 3D printer offered another example of civic participation, as people became involved in directly financing equipment for the space. CoderDojos offer free coding clubs for young people [ figure 2]: Farset Lab members volunteer as mentors to help participants design games, create websites, and build robots. Other volunteer-run community engagement activities include Raspberry Jams, which are informal education workshops that explore the basics of the Raspberry Pi single board computer. Free Flacknites (Farset Labs Hack Nights) are another event offering. Flacknite participants are challenged to finish a technical project or solve a problem in twenty-four hours. The organization has also established links with the local business community: Intel signed up as a corporate member and made contributions in the form of hardware donations. Underpinning this civic participation are critical making activities, where the modification of things inherently challenges existing systems of authority (Ratto and Boler 2014, 5). Farset’s encouragement of the reuse of technology “waste” is one such example. At a recent hackathon, the winning team was singled out because they used toilet cisterns to make a Twitter-powered drinks dispenser [figure 3]. Critical making is also apparent in the organization’s use of an Extendible Hardware Donation License, 5 a sharing paradigm that gives equipment owners of the flexibility to donate their hardware under conditional arrangements. Makerspaces are an emergent institutional form facilitating new civic media rituals. The sociotechnical dynamics of these civic activities are site specific and nuanced, as members engaged in DIY citizenship generate new modes of civic participation. In the case of Farset Labs, the foundation of these new civic identities is a culture of sharing and learning that extends from hacking microcontrollers to collectively developing the social contract for membership. Although different demographics use Farset Labs as a platform for DIY citizenship, barriers to participation still exist. More formal institutions are often accountable to diversity policies, but grassroots cultural infrastructure like Farset Labs primarily rely on the participation of people who have agency. The collectively determined aims of the organization also have the potential to limit the performance of civic identities. Farset Labs are a node in a system that has been described in humanities research as connected learning, the foci of which are social learning and the making (Ito et al, 75) of things that happen across different sites and locations, online and offline. The activities facilitated by Farset Labs extends the social learning of making by encouraging alternative thinking and responsible action, which challenges normative understandings of democratic systems and civic ...
Citations
... Makerspaces have helped frame processes of design, adaptation, and the repair of things and systems-hardware, software, networks, tools, food, currencies, energy, bacteria-as social activities (Sleigh et al., 2015). Makerspaces have also been revealed as sites that encourage self-directed civic practices and the assembling of new civic identities, or DIY citizenship (Nascimento, 2014;Toombs et al., 2014;Kubitschko, 2015;Shea, 2015;Hunsinger and Schrock, 2016). This chapter offers an additional contextual review and further evidence of emergent civic practices linked to makerspaces, focusing attention on peace-building projects in Northern Ireland. ...
... In previous writing, I have situated the case of Farset Labs as an enabler of alternative civic activity (Shea, 2015). Contrary to notions of citizenship equating to enfranchisement, the civic activities of Farset Lab members are often born of disenfranchisement. ...
Makerspaces have helped frame processes of design, adaptation, and the repair of things and systems—hardware, software, networks, tools, food, currencies, energy, bacteria—as social activities (Sleigh et al., 2015). Makerspaces have also been revealed as sites that encourage self-directed civic practices and the assembling of new civic identities, or DIY citizenship (Nascimento, 2014; Toombs et al., 2014; Kubitschko, 2015; Shea, 2015; Hunsinger and Schrock, 2016). This chapter offers an additional contextual review and further evidence of emergent civic practices linked to makerspaces, focusing attention on peace-building projects in Northern Ireland. It specifically examines the role of design and material engagement in the performance of these ethical and social interventions. The study elucidates how the propagation of alternative thinking and responsible action in Northern Ireland’s makerspaces is challenging normative understandings of civic participation.
