Reflections about Scope

This is a reflection journal that I’m doing as part of my sabbatical. Reflection journals are meant to be informal and exploratory, a way of helping me think and also capturing my thinking at a particular time. I’m sharing them here as a thinking-in-public exercise.

I worry that I’ve backed myself a bit into a corner with my sabbatical research question and that I’m going to need to break it apart and rebuild it.

My original sabbatical application posed my question as: “How can makerspaces be sites of kin-making and ecological thinking in the more-than-human-world of the Chthulucene?”

My current draft formulation is slightly expanded: “How can makerspaces and similar learning environments become sites of ecological thinking and kin-making with the more-than-human world of non-human plants, animals, places, and even technologies.”

The inspiration for this question came from many places, but particularly Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, and James Bridle’s “Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence.” During this period I was reading a lot about different ways of experiencing and understanding the world. I was also spending a lot of time hiking and swimming and exploring nature.

I was particularly excited about ideas around treating other ways of being and forms of life seriously, as well as Haraway’s call for us to “stay with the trouble” and make kin with non-human animals, plants, and places (from Bridle and others I added technologies as a way-of-being in that list).

How could we collapse the walls of the makerspace and bring the world into the makerspace, and the makerspace into the world? How could we partner with, and take seriously, other ways of being?

These ideas seemed fun and weird and immediately generative in the sense that I could imagine ways of approaching this but had no idea what the result would be.

I also added ecological thinking to the question. Not ecological-thinking as in the environment, but ecological-thinking in the sense of the John Muir quote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

I think I did this because I was trying to make the whole thing easer for people to understand than if I just included kin-making and ways-of-being.

Over time though the ecological thinking frame became dominant.

First, unsurprisingly kin-making is undoubtably a weird topic. There isn’t a lot of literature exploring it and what their is was often methodologically strange and from the fine arts or K-12 education. It was hard to see how I could build off what I was finding.

I then applied (thankfully unsuccessful) for a national research grant and through writing the application I found myself using ecological thinking more because it was easier to square with the more-normal methodology I felt like I needed to adopt to be taken seriously and because it seemed more likely that a committee would see it as valuable than they would kin-making. I wonder now of course if that is true… maybe if I had stayed with my original ideas the application would have been successful…

There is also the part of me that studied history and philosophy of science in my undergrad, and who spends far too much time reading about technology, including critical perspectives. I also see how makerspace users rarely approach technology critically or make connections between what they are doing and their communities or broader cultural, political, economic, or environmental contexts. I’ve long wanted to start building connections between student experiences in these topics, and this seemed like it might provide a pathway for doing so.

Finally, if I am honest the “ecology as interconnection between all things” became a way for the part of me that is a covetous magpie with AHDHD to hoard every bright shinny idea and pretend that I could do… well… all the things.

Which obviously isn’t going to work. I need to narrow my scope.

One option is to go with the broad ecological-thinking frame and then pick 1-3 sub-areas to focus. A benefit of this is that these sub-questions don’t necessarily need to be connected; I can do “kin-making” and “repair/maintenance” without worrying too much about how they are related. The overall project will be broader, but also shallower. I get to feed my magpie self. I get to make several very different bags.

The other option is that I go narrower but deeper and focus on several aspects of kin-making. Hopefully each lens builds on and reveals aspects of the others. I explore my original “making kin with plants and non-human animals” question. I also have an idea for a “making kin with AI” and a “community/place” question. But I lose all the shiny ideas, like repair and maintenance, that don’t fit with kin-making.

I started writing this reflection by going for a walk while talking to my phone, and then having the audio transcribed. I like this process I like a lot. Walking has always been the best way for me to think next to writing, and frankly I’m better at walking than I writing (another thing I am learning during this sabbatical).

When I started, I barely realized that there was something wrong with my research question that was stopping me from being able to narrow my scope down. Through this process of talking and writing I quickly realized that the thing I want to do is to focus on kin-making. There are a lot of ways it can be used to ask important questions but it also limits my scope significantly. More importantly it’s weirder and more interesting, and I think the conversations I have and the bags and other materials I create will be weirder and more interesting as well.