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(The following is a reflection that has at best been lightly edited and does not necessarily reflect my final thinking.)

“It is with this in mind that I proposed to my students the following — slightly opaque — provocation as central to research-creation in its strong form: the crafting of a research question is the crafting of a story that is also the crafting of an ethics.” - (How to Make Art at the End of the World A Manifesto for Research-Creation by Natalie Loveless)

I’ve been avoiding this reflection. It makes me nervous because I find it much easier to frame everything I do as purely intellectual, even neutral, bolstered with citations and outcomes. That is not really possible with this project. To quote Natalie Loveless again, this time on working interdisciplinarily: “It is to allow oneself to take on the risk of insufficiency without letting oneself off the hook for accountability.”

What stories are implied by my research question?

Research question: how can active-learning spaces such as makerspaces become sites of kin-making in the more-than-human world of the Chthulucene?

I notice three things when looking at this question now.

The first is that I believe that what happens in places like makerspaces (and places with similar pedagogies and values) matters to how we relate to the world, including the more than human world. They these things are important and worth attention.

The second thing is that I took the hard path for relationality. I decided to centre “kin-making” and the “more than human world” instead of sustainability-as-in-recycling or some form of critical thinking about the impacts of making and technology. I explicitly made this about non-human kin, places, and technologies. I don’t think I meant to exclude questions about how we impact or relate to our self or human communities, but I did decide to de-centre humans from the question.

The third thing is that I decided to use Haraway’s “Chthulucene” framing right in the question, despite it being obscure and not immediately clear how it is relevant. I’ve even kept it through multiple revisions, even though I couldn’t describe why. I even worried I was including it because I liked how it sounded.

But doing this reflection has made me realize why I included it: the Chthulucene is a story about storytelling. It’s an alternative story/future to the human-centric and inherently pessimistic story of the Anthropocene. It’s also a hopeful story where in “multispecies muddle” we “stay with the trouble” of finding new paths forward, new stories, new futures.

This is all a little strange for me to realize now because storytelling is central to how I think about what matters in makerspaces. I encourage students and faculty to think about what they are making as stories, not objects, so that they can focus on their learning process and the meaning of what they are doing over the end results.

Storytelling provides a pragmatic pathway for kin-making. A problem I’ve had with the idea of kin-making is how to make it concrete. How can I make kin with a spider or a mole or a octopus or a dog? Because those relationships will not be like human to human relationships. How is that anything other than pure hubris? But I can tell stories, I can listen to others stories, and the things I create and put into the world can tell and respond to these stories. Together we can tell better stories.

And of course, telling stories is exactly what Haraway does in “The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness”:

I want to tell stories about relating in significant otherness, through which the partners come to be who we are in flesh and sign. The following shaggy dog stories about evolution, love, training, and kinds or breeds help me think about living well together with the host of species with whom human beings emerge on this planet at every scale of time, body, and space. The accounts I offer are idiosyncratic and indicative rather than systematic, tendentious more than judicious, and rooted in contingent foundations rather than clear and distinct premises. Dogs are my story here, but they are only one player in the large world of companion species. Parts don’t add up to wholes in this mani­festo — or in life in naturecultures. Instead, I am looking for Marilyn Strathern’s “partial connections,” which are about the counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations necessary to getting on together, where the god-tricks of self certainty and deathless communion are not an option

So that is another story/ethic implied by my question: makerspaces and making can help people imagine new stories/futures about themselves, technology, and the more-than-human world.

So, what ethics are implied by my research question?

The more-than-human world is important. People, communities, other species, places, maybe even technologies are kin. They deserve our consideration.

Making, in all it’s various forms and levels (makerspace, kitchens, studios, classrooms, garages, digital humanities labs, workshops, etc) provides pathways for telling stories about the world and the future. These stories are important, probably more important than the objects that go with them.

Stories are important and we need new stories/futures for “staying with the trouble” together.

What about methodology?

I have this quote saved from when I first created this note:

Containers teach us about interdependence, how nothing exists on its own without an intricate web of (often invisible) support. Containers carry with them an ethics of care. - What Containers Reveal (And Conceal) About Design and Life

I haven’t talked about my methodology in this reflection, and i am running out of steam so I will have to get to it in more detail later, but I think a carrier bag methodology is partly about increasing the diversity of stories we tell and partly about an ethics of care implied by the form of a carrier bag.

But that will need to wait for another day.

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