Improvising Field Research in Covid-era Hackerspaces

Hackerspaces and makerspaces are community-oriented technology and art workshops facilitating new forms of public life and filling infrastructural gaps in cities (but for the sake of brevity, I refer to both as hackerspaces here). My dissertation project aims at understanding how hackerspaces relate to the built environment and how they create new imaginaries of citizenship in U.S. cities like San Francisco and Detroit. Here I reflect on some of the challenges I faced researching these spaces as they constantly adapted to unaccommodating city environments before and during the pandemic. During my field research, I had to learn to follow them through their various improvisational strategies

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak · Art · Citizenship · Engineering ethics · Improvisation · Pandemic · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Sociology · Visual arts · Digital Games and Media · Engineering · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction