How We Make [Deadline Extended]

deadline for submissions: 
April 1, 2017
full name / name of organization: 
University of Florida TRACE Innovation Initiative
contact email: 

How We Make

TRACE publishes online peer-reviewed collections in ecology, posthumanism, and media studies. Providing an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, we focus on the ethical and material impact of technology. We welcome submissions in a variety of media that engage cultures, theories, and environments to “trace” the connections across and within various ecologies.

The third issue of TRACE, How We Make, explores how we make “through, with, and alongside” (N. Katherine Hayles) a larger ecology of technology, society, and design. The growing availability of cheap and easily hackable technology has captured commercial and scholarly attention worldwide, instigating a new type of DIY citizenship built from a hybrid economy of material, conceptual, and digital production. Publications like Make Magazine, online tutorials like Instructables, and community makerspace labs like Artisan’s Asylum offer multiple platforms for ‘how to’ projects– anything from building a home to hacking software or 3D-printing a prosthetic limb. But is it enough to make for making’s sake? And how do we attend to the longer history of makers and makerspaces? This issue offers a critical forum to discuss how technology changes the way we make theoretically and practically.  

Scholars from communication, design, and media studies, such as Matt Ratto, Victor Papanek, and David Gauntlett, theorize a material-semiotic approach that emphasizes either process or product – the ‘how,’ ‘why,’ or ‘what’ of making. While “critical making” reflects conceptually on the making process, “sustainable design” connects the a designer’s role in society with the impact of the final product. Making has also been approached through “DiDIY” (digital do-it-yourself), focusing on digital technologies’ impact on creative projects. Building off this scholarship, “How We Make” asks scholars and makers to critically reflect on the making process in their communities, makerspaces, and classrooms in order to reveal new insight into the maker movement.

Using the momentum generated by recent digital humanities scholarship, TRACE invites submissions in the following categories:

1) Theory – The theoretical section asks scholars to be critical of making, investigating process, history, ecology, and trends. Potential projects may explore how theories of making engage or neglect race/class/gender/accessibility issues, how making is beneficial to society and could empower traditionally oppressed social groups, how the nonhuman participates in making, or how making challenges traditional consumer/producer models or privileges specific skills.  

2) Praxis – The practical section calls for maker submissions detailing approaches to making and the results/impacts. Potential projects may discuss issues of accessibility, learning by doing, spaces (virtual or actual) of collaboration, best practice for amateurs learning DIY electronics, funding scholarly making, the use of maker labs, or making as serious scholarship.

3) Pedagogy – The pedagogical section calls for educational submissions detailing making in the classroom. Potential projects may cover connections between ‘making’ and education or invention, low-tech making in the classroom, definitions of making for education, pedagogical implications when asking students to think of writing/composing as making, or reflections on course outcomes including syllabus and course assignments.  

Multimedia submissions are accepted and encouraged - TRACE can support text, video, image, sound, game, and other file formats. Completed articles will be peer-reviewed and should be between 3000-6000 words in length. If you are interested in contributing to the TRACE Innovation Initiative’s third issue, please send your finalized project to trace@english.ufl.edu by April 1, 2017

 

Direct questions to the Issue co-editors: Emily Brooks [emily081390@ufl.edu] and Shannon Butts [shannon.butts@ufl.edu]

For more information about TRACE, please visit trace.english.ufl.edu

For information about style guides, peer-review, or if you would like to participate in the review process, please email trace@english.ufl.edu