The Pedagogy of Gear Touchers: Unearthing Modes of Teaching Within and Through DIY Venues

Background: Within the body of literature on do-it-yourself (DIY) music scenes, researchers have routinely placed an emphasis on the role of material space in shaping the sociocultural and musical practices of punk music and other related genres. Scholars have also examined the teaching and learning processes of these musical subcultures under the banner of “punk pedagogy” scholarship. However, investigations into the intersection between these two strands of research need to occur because theories of punk pedagogy have largely overlooked the role of physical space within the educative practices of DIY music. Research into the thematically related space of the maker movement amplifies this need, because maker education scholars have repeatedly shown the multiple ways that materials and space shape how individuals learn through DIY production. Research Questions: I use this paper to attend to the following questions: How do DIY music venues shape the pedagogical practices of DIY music scenes? And in what ways do those pedagogies align with the ideological and ethical aims of these communities? By focusing on learning within DIY venues, I consider multiple forms of musical production outside of the context of a specific genre (i.e., punk). This study therefore provides insight into the mechanisms through which individuals learn and how those mechanisms relate to the physical affordances of these spaces. Research Design: To address these questions, I conducted a year-long comparative case study into two intertwined music series centered on noise music (an experimental subgenre within DIY music’s broad umbrella) and located in two separate DIY venues. Although each of the 13 events in this series included both a workshop and a concert, I focus my analysis on the concert portion of the series to explore a common site of interaction within DIY scenes. Through open and iterative qualitative analyses of field notes generated from observations of concerts in the series and interviews with featured artists and audience members, I provide a nuanced understanding of learning within DIY music venues and the role that both material space and technologies play in shaping that process. Conclusions: Drawing on this analysis, I contend that the stageless design of DIY venues provides a physical affordance that allows “gear toucher conversations” to occur. These conversations involve audience members engaging performers in discussions about the music technologies they use mere seconds after they finish performing, thus linking this pedagogical moment to the material attributes of the venue. However, these conversations reinscribe masculine notions of technology and undermine DIY music’s egalitarian politics, a finding that mirrors critical research into maker education. This work therefore calls on both researchers and practitioners to contend with the pedagogies of place and the educative processes that emerge out of situated technologies to further the liberatory praxes that DIY production can produce.