Historicizing making and doing: Seymour Papert, Sherry Turkle, and epistemological foundations of the maker movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT The field of science and technology studies (STS) has recently formalized a performative category of scholarship called ‘making and doing’. Making and doing recognizes engaged and reflexive practices that help STS claims and ideas travel between social worlds by means other than academic publications and presentations. At this time, little attention has been paid to the historical conditions and epistemologies that helped to construct this category. While STS may appear to be merely exploiting the twenty-first century popularity of the maker movement, we have found that feminist and ethnographic approaches to science played historically significant roles in the epistemic formation and foundation of the movement itself. By tracing the influence of STS on the maker movement to late twentieth century collaborations between Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert, we aim to interfere in making and doing narratives by proposing to hold STS accountable for the socio-technical world-making in which it is implicated.