WA 2015 Week 49 Holman, Mattern, Barron, Students
Reads This Week
It’s 2015-12-12 and I’m still looking at the rough draft of this post languishing unpublished. So instead of heavily annotating why I like these so much, I’m just going to grab a quote that I hope entices you to read each of them. Clearly, I’m still figuring out what these “Weekly Assemblages” will be!
Will Holman’s “Makerspace: Towards a New Civic Infrastructure”
Makerspace: Towards a New Civic Infrastructure
For makerspaces to become similarly ubiquitous and sustainable platforms, they need to offer the kind of institutional stability that will support meaningful community programming, educational opportunity, and grassroots economic growth. A glance at the history of makerspaces illustrates both the challenges and opportunities of building communities, and businesses, around the ethos of shared making.
History, infrastructure, pedagogy, awareness of current limitations—this piece has bits of all of what I appreciate when talking about culture and technology.
Shannon Mattern’s “Library as Infrastructure”
These new social functions — which may require new physical infrastructures to support them — broaden the library’s narrative to include everyone, not only the “have-nots.” This is not to say that the library should abandon the needy and focus on an elite patron group; rather, the library should incorporate the “enfranchised” as a key public, both so that the institution can reinforce its mission as a social infrastructure for an inclusive public, and so that privileged, educated users can bring their knowledge and talents to the library and offer them up as social-infrastructural resources.
Library as platform, as social infrastructure, as technological-intellectual infrastructure, as embedded within a larger assemblages of infrastructure—this is worth making time to read in depth.
Simon Barron’s “Safe Spaces at Library Conferences”
Safe Spaces at Library Conferences
Safe-space policies do not suppress freedom of expression. They protect it.
Really, just go read all of this one!
The Demands
Across the nation, students have risen up to demand an end to systemic and structural racism on campus. Here are their demands.
Useful compilation of more than 70 lists of demands by students around the United States.
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