Andreas Ottemo, Maria Berge, Heather Mendick, E. Silfver
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引用次数: 1
Abstract
As ‘open’ and supposedly inclusive informal learning settings that participants visit out of interest and passion, there has been hope that makerspaces will democratize technology and challenge traditional gender patterns in engineering education. Passion for technology has, however, also been shown to be deeply intertwined with the masculinization of engineering. This article explores how this tension manifests among engineering students and other makers at an ‘open’ voluntaristically-organized technology makerspace located at the campus of a Swedish university of technology. It draws on a post-structural understanding of gender and Sara Ahmed’s queer-phenomenological conceptualization of emotions as ‘orienting devices’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with makers, we show how passion for technology is articulated as a particularly absorbing emotion that underpins a playful approach to technology and a framing of makers as single-minded and asocial. We demonstrate how passion for technology thereby becomes a homosocial ‘glue’ that makes technology ‘sticky’ for only a select group of techno-passionate men. We conclude that this undermines the potential for ‘making’ to democratize technology and puts into question the degree to which interest-driven, voluntaristic and ‘authentic’ settings for engaging with technology can contribute to pluralizing engineering.
Engineering StudiesENGINEERING, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
CiteScore
3.60
自引率
17.60%
发文量
12
审稿时长
>12 weeks
期刊介绍:
Engineering Studies is an interdisciplinary, international journal devoted to the scholarly study of engineers and engineering. Its mission is threefold:
1. to advance critical analysis in historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, rhetorical, and organizational studies of engineers and engineering;
2. to help build and serve diverse communities of researchers interested in engineering studies;
3. to link scholarly work in engineering studies with broader discussions and debates about engineering education, research, practice, policy, and representation.
The editors of Engineering Studies are interested in papers that consider the following questions:
• How does this paper enhance critical understanding of engineers or engineering?
• What are the relationships among the technical and nontechnical dimensions of engineering practices, and how do these relationships change over time and from place to place?