[Asis-l] UCLA Information Studies Colloquium: Matt Ratto

[Elizabeth Kalbers]

UCLA Information Studies Colloquium: Matt Ratto

Title: "Making the DIY citizen: Making, scholarship, and humanities education"

April 30, 3pm at GSE&IS 111

Abstract: Abstract: Making seems to be taking over the world, described as a cure-all for everything from a stagnant economy to the alienation that attends the commodity fetishism of industrial capitalism. What can we make of these claims? How can we as educators and as scholars engage with the ‘Maker Movement’ without falling prey to the utopian and instrumental ideas that often attend it?

In this talk, I will explore the central conceits of making, using the development of ‘critical making’ to unpack and open up the productive contradictions that exist within this work. Specifically, I will engage with the role making can play in educational and research contexts that want to maintain commitments to humanities-based values and outcomes while still engaging with the possibilities of emergent technological systems. Since 2007, I have been both conceptually and concretely reconnoitering the space of hybrid socio-technical research and teaching, drawing upon resources from the fields of Information Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and adjacent work and practices in art, engineering, and design. The purpose of this work has been threefold; first, to instantiate a research program aimed at extending theoretical ‘material-semiotic’ scholarship that can support material as well as conceptual exploration; second, to develop curriculum that incorporates a constructivist pedagogy centrally into socio-technical studies; and third, to support an activist agenda that provides new resources for producing DIY citizens. I will report on the successes and failures of my work to date, using these to map out where we are now and what remains to be done.

Matt Ratto is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and directs the Semaphore Research cluster on Inclusive Design, Mobile and Pervasive Computing and, as part of Semaphore, the Critical Making lab. 
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Elizabeth Kalbers
Administrative Assistant 
Department of Information Studies
310-206-9393
kalbers at gseis.ucla.edu

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