A Node on the Constellation: The Role of Feminist Makerspaces in Building and Sustaining Alternative Cultures of Technology Production
🤖 AI Summary
This study examines how feminist makerspaces sustain themselves long-term within structurally unstable institutional environments, challenging growth-oriented and individualistic logics dominant in technical culture. Employing a qualitative methodology combining in-depth interviews and autoethnography, the research analyzes organizational practices across eight feminist makerspaces in the United States. It introduces the theoretical framework of “prefigurative counter-spaces,” demonstrating how these spaces cultivate alternative sociotechnical infrastructures through care-centered stewardship governance, decentralized collective decision-making, and cross-movement solidarity alliances—thereby enabling non-growth-dependent operations, visible reproductive labor, and endogenous value generation. The core contribution lies in identifying three interlocking mechanisms sustaining alternative technical cultures: (1) infrastructural care work, (2) anti-hierarchical coordination, and (3) movement-anchored resilience. This advances feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) and infrastructure studies by retheorizing sustainability, care labor, and anti-institutional practice beyond extractive or scalability paradigms.
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📝 Abstract
Feminist makerspaces offer community led alternatives to dominant tech cultures by centering care, mutual aid, and collective knowledge production. While prior CSCW research has explored their inclusive practices, less is known about how these spaces sustain themselves over time. Drawing on interviews with 18 founders and members across 8 U.S. feminist makerspaces as well as autoethnographic reflection, we examine the organizational and relational practices that support long-term endurance. We find that sustainability is not achieved through growth or institutionalization, but through care-driven stewardship, solidarity with local justice movements, and shared governance. These social practices position feminist makerspaces as prefigurative counterspaces - sites that enact, rather than defer, feminist values in everyday practice. This paper offers empirical insight into how feminist makerspaces persist amid structural precarity, and highlights the forms of labor and coalition-building that underpin alternative sociotechnical infrastructures.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
How feminist makerspaces sustain alternative tech cultures
Examining long-term endurance practices in feminist makerspaces
Understanding labor and coalition-building in sociotechnical infrastructures
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Care-driven stewardship sustains feminist makerspaces
Solidarity with local justice movements aids longevity
Shared governance enacts feminist values daily
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