Makerspace partnership wins an Outreach and Engagement grant

"Critical Making as Critical Care”—a pilot program at the Department of Communication with support of the Libraries Makerspaces and Circuit Research Studio— has received an NC State Outreach and Engagement Incentives Grant.

This program will implement practices of 'making with' technologies as a strategy for serious play, critical reflection, and social intervention through a series of face-to-face making workshops and establishing an online community engaged in critical making practices. The purpose of this program is to further critical technology literacy, cultivate embodied intersectional making practices, and engage with social justice design among underserved student populations enrolled in community colleges that are part of the Community College Collaboration (C3) at NC State.

"I'm very excited to help support this new series of workshops for C3 students focused on building community and equity through Critical Making,” says Colin Nickels, Lead Librarian for Experiential Learning Services. Nickels, Justin Haynes, Colin Keenan, and Ian Boyd will help facilitate the use of Libraries spaces and resources in these workshops. Adam Rogers and the Innovation Studio team may help capture and exhibit some of the workshop outcomes.

The contributions of this pilot program include the development and implementation of an interdisciplinary curriculum for Critical Making that will further community college students' critical technological literacy by inviting them to engage with various types of technologies and experiment with how these technocultural artifacts can be rearranged to materialize more just and equitable expressions of humankind(ness). Also, this program will assess how critical making, reframed as an approach oriented towards community care, may advance justice-oriented making and social well-being.