CFP: “How We Make,” Special Issue of TRACE (University of Florida)

From the call (pdf):

TRACE publishes online peer-reviewed collections in ecology, posthumanism, and media studies. Providing an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, we focus on the ethical and material impact of technology. We welcome submissions in a variety of media that engage cultures, theories, and environments to “trace” the connections across and within various ecologies.

The third issue of TRACE, How We Make, explores how we make “through, with, and alongside” (N. Katherine Hayles) a larger ecology of technology, society, and design. The growing availability of cheap and easily hackable technology has captured commercial and scholarly attention worldwide, instigating a new type of DIY citizenship built from a hybrid economy of material, conceptual, and digital production. Publications like Make Magazine, online tutorials like Instructables, and community makerspace labs like Artisan’s Asylum offer multiple platforms for ‘how to’ projects– anything from building a home to hacking software or 3D-printing a prosthetic limb. But is it enough to make for making’s sake? And how do we attend to the longer history of makers and makerspaces? This issue offers a critical forum to discuss how technology changes the way we make theoretically and practically.

This special issue asks for submissions focusing on one the following areas, referencing “the momentum generated by recent digital humanities scholarship”:

1) Theory – The theoretical section asks scholars to be critical of making, investigating process, history, ecology, and trends. Potential projects may explore how theories of making engage or neglect race/class/gender/accessibility issues, how making is beneficial to society and could empower traditionally oppressed social groups, how the nonhuman participates in making, or how making challenges traditional consumer/producer models or privileges specific skills.

2) Praxis – The practical section calls for maker submissions detailing approaches to making and the results/impacts. Potential projects may discuss issues of accessibility, learning by doing, spaces (virtual or actual) of collaboration, best practice for amateurs learning DIY electronics, funding scholarly making, the use of maker labs, or making as serious scholarship.

3) Pedagogy – The pedagogical section calls for educational submissions detailing making in the classroom. Potential projects may cover connections between ‘making’ and education or invention, low-tech making in the classroom, definitions of making for education, pedagogical implications when asking students to think of writing/composing as making, or reflections on course outcomes including syllabus and course assignments.

Completed articles should be submitted to trace@english.ufl.edu by February 1, 2017.