Making Our World

“This brilliant book analyses hacking and making: the leading spirits of our technological age. Making Our World is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how information technologies are being created and are creating our society and the strategies being used by those who make such technologies outside of corporations and governments. The book brings together world-leading experts on some of the most recent technological innovations, and these authors deliver a powerful analysis of the global meaning of both making and hacking technologies. Importantly, the book has a genuinely international reach because it refuses to take the ‘global’ to be some generic allencompassing idea and instead analyses in specific contexts around the world the different ways hacking and making create and are being created in society.” —Tim Jordan, Professor of Digital Cultures at the University of Sussex
“Making Our World draws important and under-realized connections between often disparate strands of scholarship around the promise of hacking and making. From critical perspectives to hopeful exemplars, the authors pose new forms of world-building as central sites to illuminate the often mystifying influence of technology cultures. Hacking is not only ordinary, the authors show, but also tied up in the production of ordinariness—of the everyday concerns, identities, and collectives through which transformations of civil society unfold. Whether in makerspaces, start-up lofts, hackathons, or protests—online or out on the streets—these grounded studies interrogate and, in some cases, recover the often precarious terms of neoliberal educational and economic reform.” —Daniela Rosner, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington
“Making Our World offers an expansive view of the continued evolution of discourses on hacking and making. Readers will appreciate the revitalizing commentary from various geographies and viewpoints that trouble taken-for-granted associations of making and hacking in the contemporary global economy and culture. This book is good reading for those seeking to understand not just the ideals and values that continue to be attached to making and hacking but also the variegated situated practices that accompany their reproduction and repurposes in various sociopolitical contexts.” —Seyram Avle, Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst