The possibilities are endless when you head into one of Vancouver’s makerspaces – but not everyone has the same means of accessing these spaces.
What are makerspaces?
Vancouver is full of makerspaces: hubs for making, building, and crafting projects that are open to people of all skill levels. An abundance of shared resources needed to create the project you envisioned are there at your fingertips: tools, shop space, learning opportunities, and connections with others in the community. At the Vancouver Tool Library (VTL), where I am on the Board of Directors, the members of our co-operative non-profit have built incredible things: boats, skis, furniture, and tiny homes, just to name a few! Ideally, makerspaces are meant to be the place you go to make your dream idea come to life. They are great spots to pursue an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
However, makerspaces often end up replicating structural and systemic barriers that can make it difficult to access these valuable resources. Recently, UBC’s own Centre for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) held an event that welcomed makerspace organizers and members, as well as UBC students and Faculty, to have a conversation around this very topic.
Power and privilege in makerspaces
Makerspaces tend to privilege the same people that hold much of the world’s institutional and structural power. This means that makerspaces often only feel completely welcoming for cisgender able-bodied white men. Folks who do not fit into that particular identity may find that makerspaces are exclusionary and do not meet their needs as users. Feelings of discomfort and fear can come from the language used in the space, assumptions about your knowledge and abilities, and an organization’s governing policies, which outline their priorities. Though I am the longest-standing VTL board member and my work there has been endlessly rewarding and fun, there are times when I still feel, as a woman, that the space was not made to accommodate me. In other ways, I benefit from being in a position of privilege, as I am cisgender and white with no visible disabilities. As I’ve learned, it is not enough to have women and non-binary people, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC), LGBTQ/2S folks, people with disabilities, and people on limited incomes in the space.
For makerspaces, and indeed other institutionalized spaces, changes need to be made at a structural level in order to address the power and privilege that can render them inaccessible before people even get in the door. This is why it is a major priority of the VTL and many of Vancouver’s other makerspaces that we commit to formalizing anti-oppression frameworks around which we can base our operations. Of course, systemic prejudice does not stop at the doors of makerspaces; we can begin to think about and apply these sorts of frameworks in other environments.
On the evening of November 29th, 2017, around 30 of us gathered at Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House (located on unceded Coast Salish territories) to put this all out in the open with the help of CCEL and UBC’s Equity and Inclusion office. With warm food catered by Tayybeh - a cooking collective run by Syrian women who recently came to Canada as refugees - in our bellies, we were full of energy to begin. With help from our wonderful facilitators Steph Lim and Naomi Schatz, the attendees worked toward a number of objectives for the evening and I would like to share some of what came out of the event.
It is important to work with a shared vocabulary
We spent some time defining key terms such as power, privilege, intersectionality, and makerspaces. Language can be a huge barrier to these kinds of conversations and we wanted to break down the jargon-y words that can make people immediately feel like they do not want to dive in. The same can be said about other spaces too, especially classrooms: having everyone start with the same baseline of knowledge before heading into a discussion enables more robust and productive interactions. It lessens the chance that people will feel left out from the beginning.
We need to figure out the issues at hand and how they appear
We began to articulate who is able to be there at the event, who is in makerspaces generally, and who is not (and why). It is essential to name specific communities, in order to think of the unique (and overlapping) ways in which they may be excluded from participating. Several attendees made points about the invisibility of some forms of oppression and the assumptions we make about others based on what we can see.
Be a good ally
It should go without saying, but we all move through the world in different ways, experiencing things based on our own positions. The attendees discussed a video by Franchesca “Chescaleigh” Ramsey on allyship and learned we must understand ways in which we are privileged, do our own research (instead of waiting to be educated), speak up but not over, apologize for mistakes when we make them (and know it’s OK to mess up along the way), and remember that ally is a verb (you’ve got to walk the walk).
Now, how can we put this all into action?
Change won’t happen overnight but we have to start somewhere. From this evening, the attendees were able to assemble a greater list of resources among different makerspaces, look at toolkits for creating more inclusive spaces, make new contacts around the city, and find others with whom to develop an ongoing process to collectively address issues of privilege and power in these spaces. Luckily, CCEL offers a range of workshops and events designed to equip students with the skills to continue having these kinds of conversations and create their own community initiatives.
Hopefully, this is the first in a series of ongoing collaborations and initiatives. Maker communities must work together to dismantle forms of oppression that exist in these spaces that are meant to broaden our horizons and expand our skill sets. Often, the most valuable insights about building something come from first taking it apart.