11. The Boy's Club is Adjourned

Last week had a significant portion devoted to lab time, which I considered both a blessing and a curse. While everyone else in class had projects they were dutifully working on, I was trying to brainstorm my next steps, wondering if I should dabble in the hacking fashion challenge or simply come up with a new project to fill up the time. After fiddling around with a piece of clothing I deemed “the jacket of many zippers,” trying to determine whether I could create an arm cannon á la Samus Aran, I decided to abandon my floundering project and turn to a 3D printing project. I wanted to create a 3D printable Pokémon alongside its own 3D Pokéball and spent much of the time modeling the Pokéball in Tinkercad before realizing I would not have enough time to print both the Pokémon and the Pokéball. I then decided to use a 3D model design for a Jigglypuff I found on My Mini Factory and the print turned out beautifully!

I think all of the focus on projects let to a much more muted and brief conversation on the readings last week, focusing on the juxtaposition of the disparities of the maker movement highlighted in Leah Buechley’s talk and inadvertently in the Make: media kit alongside the utopian visions of childhood wonderment in Innocent Experiments. I think one of the most important takeaways of the conversation was how women are perceived as the bane of curiousity and experimentation, which we see manifest in the targeted audience of the maker movement. The perception that dominates is that men, specifically white men, will be the ones designing and implementing the next great experiment and to practice innovation in our society is to leave these handymen to their own devices so they can create the next big thing. Yet, the formation of the “boy’s clubs” of science and making truly distorts the historical and contemporary experience of women, and people of color, as contributors to these disciplines and ways of doing. It’s the revisionist history that cherishes Watson and Crick, but fails to mention Rosalind Franklin. What I like about Rebecca Onion’s work is that she accepts these perceptions as intentionally created to exclude and define what truly is a tinkerer, an experimenter. It certainly isn’t the mom who is constantly worried her son will blow up the house (what a mess that would be!).

I think what the last two chapters of Innocent Experiments does well is to highlight the ways in which childhood curiosity is shaped and how it’s often not simply a formless phenomenon. The librarians using science fiction to appeal to space cadet kids knew that their actions “implicitly and explicitly claimed importance for their own field, which was doing such crucial work in helping children connect with science.”[1] Guiding children to their natural curiosities and allowing them to interact how they want with objects and the lessons they imparted was also a goal of Frank Oppenheimer and the Exploratorium. Onion zeroed on Oppenheimer’s desire to make science accessible to everyone, stating “if the Science Talent Search sought to support a new cohort of young scientists by creating a youth culture that accepted and rewarded their “talent,” Oppenheimer wanted to heal a larger culture separated from what he saw as the basic human instinct toward curiosity.”[2] In this, the ethos of “everyone can be makers” is brought to fruition with children exploring their interests through the narrative world of science fiction or the physical world of the museum. The boy’s club is permanently adjourned as the shapers of curiosity bring everyone from the next generation into the fold.

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[1] Onion, Rebecca. Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 119.

[2]  Onion, Innocent Experiments, p. 152.