Maker Cultures and the Beating of Our Hearts

• In Event: 34.080 - Affective Potentials in Informal, Media-Rich Learning Programs: New Directions in Theory and Design

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework
Makerspace and maker cultures typically approach design work and tinkering with materials as creative and problem-solving endeavours and less about emotional investments in the process. Maker genealogies are linked with craftmanship (Schrock, 2014) and with systems and DIY practices (Knobel & Lankshear, 2010) rather than with issues that concern the ‘beating of the heart’ (Shillotoe, 2018). In this paper, I approach making as emotional work and identify moments during making when there are “flows of unspoken desire” (Author) that surface and that move meanings in important and often unacknowledged ways. In the paper, I will present a six-week maker videogame project in a ninth-grade classroom.
Affect moves to the foreground of theorizing literacy events (Author) when thinking about the beating of the hearts and how feelings are registered on the body (Massumi, 2007) during gaming-maker work. Ingold (2007) discusses our ‘entanglements’ with objects, but also how we move through these object landscapes, the ‘lines’ we make, and the threads we follow and traces we leave of that activity are sedimented into the maker work that takes place. As we walk, we create invisible lines in the landscape that can, if trodden over and over, create a trace of our movement over the earth (Ingold, 2007). Pink has used the term ‘sensory ethnography’ to describe this phenomenological turn in social science, away from the linguistic ‘schema’ of multimodality, into a lens that is more ‘in place’ that involves ‘coming to know’ in perceptual terms (Pink, 2009). This presentation builds on these theoretical frameworks to attend to affective flows during a six-week videogame-maker project.

Methods and Data
To locate the organic and affective during fieldwork, I engaged in making alongside my participants during the six-week videogame project. Together, such collaboration aligns with work on co-research and co-production (Campbell et al, 2018). Alongside co-production and co-research, I conducted interviews, took detailed ethnographic fieldnotes, and collected multimodal artifacts.

Discussion and Significance
Currently discourses in education focus on the ways of incorporating new tools (materials) and technologies (products) but within a design paradigm (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996), which does not get at the feelingful, beating of the heart ways (processes) that I have observed children and teenagers exist in make cultures. Analysis helped me to better understand the ways children called into being - often in the moment of playing-with-materials – affective flows that became sedimented into texts. Writing then, is about how affective flows are imprinted in the making process.

Author

• Jennifer Rowsell, Brock University