FRAMING

The implementation of this initiative is founded upon three theoretical premises.

1. Technologies and cultural artifacts are more than the thingness that binds them into a sense of physical unity. Technologies and innovation models are sustained by technological forms of knowledge that are biased in how they organize ways to know and represent reality. Evidence of racially biased technologies can be traced from the representational limitations of color film used in photography that prioritized the accurate representation of lighter skin tones, which led to distorted, off-colored, indistinct photographs of people of color to the coded biases of facial recognition software that is unable to recognize or differentiate non-white faces. Therefore, we argue for an understanding of our technological human condition as one that is “a political exercise of the interrelationship between science, technology, and power as a matrix of complex dominations” (Haraway, 1991, p. 165) built upon otherness and difference. 
2. “Making with” as a way to “think about” technologies fosters pedagogical innovation because it proposes semi-structured and autonomous exploration on how technology works, it engages the emotional dimension of learning, mental energy, feelings and motivations that are influenced by the cognition or understanding, and because it enables the creation of transitional objects – which “do not just serve to illustrate’ concepts, but act as means for projecting oneself into an abstraction” (Ratto, 2011, p.254). By focusing on “thinking through making”, this initiative emphasizes procedural literacy, the ability to read and write processes, to engage with representation as the interplay between the culturally-embedded practices of human meaning-making and technically-mediated processes (Mateas, 2005). 
3. A critical engagement with technologies must make room for intersectional experiences and forms of care. The world of making, specifically making with emerging technologies, is inundated by masculinity and whiteness (Gollihue & Browning, 2019). There is an implied gender division between what is considered a highly technical skill (writing code, dealing with electronics, soldering) as dominated by the male presence. There are other softer skills (sewing, crafting, gardening) that are more commonly described as feminine. Such distinction is put into practice when we define what counts as knowledge, what counts as technical literacy and technology, what counts as making. This initiative puts in practice an intersectional, justice-oriented approach to making that pays attention to embodied narratives: what makers experience out-side of institutions, the pressures they exist within, the places they are kept out of, and the practices they find familiar and safe (Harwood, 2019). When we create spaces for critical making to enact critical care, we interrogate what we are relegating to the margins and what we are centering. We create opportunities for more time to linger in experience, to play, to focus on the personal and relational parts of our scholarship and restorative creations (Stone, 2018), and to forge relationships with others like and unlike us.