Making in the Chthulucene: A Carrier Bag Sabbatical

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again–if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.” (Ursula K Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction)

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene my sabbatical explores the question: How can makerspaces and similar learning environments become sites of kin-making and ecological thinking in the more-than-human world of the Chthulucene? And how can we do this without compromising the pedagogies and values that make these learning environments special.

I will approach this question as a research-creation project, using design inquiry to make one or more carrier bags that will hold the ideas, stories, and materials I want to bring back to my work. The process I use, and the design of the bags and other materials I create, will be my best attempt at exploring these ideas without compromising the values and pedagogies that make these learning spaces special.

Making in the Chthulucene

Haraway’s notion of kin-making asks us to go beyond human relationships to include non-human species and places — the more-than-human world — as equal partners as we “stay with the trouble” and find ways of “getting on together” in these times of ecological and social disruption.

For me, this is personal as well as professional. I spend weekends and holidays wandering forests and tide pools with my partner, wondering at the marvels of nature. Many evenings I find myself paralyzed as I read about overlapping and compounding ecological, social, and political crises. Many of these crises are implicitly tied to the technological systems that define so much of our lives. Yet I also love technology. I run a makerspace where students become lifelong learners of technology through hands-on, passion-based learning, community, belonging, experimentation, and play. It’s the most rewarding work I’ve done.

Yet makerspaces, including my own, often present technology and making as neutral. While many disciplines address ethics, sustainability, and social impact, they usually do so through structured courses and disciplinary frameworks. I want to explore how makerspaces as informal, creative, and learner-driven spaces where autonomy is important can integrate ecological thinking and kin-making without compromising the pedagogies and values that make these learning environments special.

Carrier Bags as Method and Outcome

“Before–once you think about it, surely long before–the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger– for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug ones you can’t eat home in–with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.” (Ursula K Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction)

In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin proposes that the proper shape for a story isn’t the hero’s quest but rather a “carrier bag” that can be a vessel for many different types of stories. Freed from the hero’s rigid need to dominate, the story has room to be “full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions.”

I’ve read and shared this essay many times, and it’s shaped how I think about my work. In its design and pedagogy, the makerspace I run is a kind of carrier bag for everything I’ve gathered and learned about helping people gain the confidence to learn, problem-solve, and make things with technology.

So, I’ve decided that my sabbatical will take the form of a Carrier Bag Sabbatical both as method and creative research outcome.

I am being literal. I am going to design and sew (or otherwise fabricate) actual carrier bags. Doing so will mean that I am doing what I ask learners in our space to do. I will sew bags — something I’ve had very little experience with until recently — that will be personally meaningful, experimental, and playful responses to my questions. Importantly, I hope they will themselves be stories of what I learn and the people and ideas I encounter.

I’m particularly interested in several implications of taking this idea seriously:

• The idea of gathering what is “edible, useful, or beautiful” to share with those you love: This gives me a clear ethical but also flexible definition of what kinds of ideas and stories I want in my bag. It is also a reminder of the importance of having an ethic of care towards those who will be impacted by my work.
• The rejection of the heroic narrative: This has a clear pragmatic appeal. A six-month sabbatical is just enough time to feel pressured to produce something substantive without being enough time to conduct a major research project. The implication that I should reject the definitive heroic research outcome feels like turning a limitation into a liberation.
• The call for multiple alternative types of stories and outcomes: Le Guin didn’t reject the hero’s quest because she was lazy:

“So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?” (Ursula K Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction)

• The implication is that different types of stories and outcomes are required. It suggests that small, ambiguous, unsuccessful, funny, or frivolous stories and outcomes might be as important as grant theories. That students, staff, and community members are as legitimate sources as tenured faculty. This also recalls Haraway’s call to stay with the trouble:

“In the face of unrelenting historically specific surplus suffering in companion species knottings, ==I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble.== And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. These are stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation” (Donna Haraway, 2016, p. 10)

• The centring of purposes and bodies when thinking about technology: A good bag fits a purpose and wearer. Bags are meant to be carried by fleshy living creatures. A purse, a backpack, a fishing net, a tool roll, and a grocery bag are all built to different purposes. What one body finds comfortable doesn’t work for other bodies. A carrer bag sabbatical is meant to create a bag for people or other creatures, to bring back insights that benefit them.
• The reminder to be adaptable: what we carry in a bag changes over time and with our needs. We can take things out of the bag when they stop serving us. The bag metaphor reminds me to be experimental and iterative, take risks, be playful, and most importantly be willing to change.

Outcomes

My main outcome of my sabbatical will be one or more carrier bags that I design and create in response to what I learn while exploring the question: “How can makerspaces be sites of kin-making and ecological thinking in the more-than-human-world of the Chthulucene?”

The bags will be content, content carrier, and exemplar.

• They will be content in the sense that the design of the bags, from the material used to what they facilitate, will tell the story of what I learned.
• They will be content carriers in that the bags will contain what I find that is “edible, useful, or beautiful” that I want to share.
• Finally, they will be exemplars in that the process used to create the bags will follow maker pedagogies and represent one approach to these difficult questions.

Each bag will include an interpretive guide that will describe each design decision.

In addition to the bags, I will:

• Conduct semi-structured interviews with educators, makers, learners, and community members to explore how they connect making with kin-making and ecological thinking. These interviews will inform and in some cases become part of the bags I create.
• Keep a reflective journal and photo record of what I am learning and the process of making the bags.
• Develop a digital website that will share the bags and bag content as well as the reflective journals and photo objects.