I’ve spent the past 7 months working with Trans Pride Brighton to organise their first ever livestream Pride event. Trans Pride Brighton has been going since 2013 and is the largest Trans Pride event outside the USA. This year’s online festival showcased the work of trans, non-binary and intersex performers and activists to an audience of 50,000 people. We even made it onto the Twitch homepage! Check out the event here.
I spent yesterday up at the University of Sussex at a free symposium hosted by the Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology (FACT///.) research network. Despite being one of my local universities I don’t make it up to campus nearly often enough, so it was great to meet some of the researchers based at the Sussex
Last week I was at the 35th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig to talk on a panel about building inclusive hacker and maker communities. The Congress is organised annually by Europe’s largest hacker association, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), and is the continent’s oldest and largest hacker convention. This year it hosted 16,000 visitors who
As part of this year’s EMF Camp I organised a workshop to share information on how to build inclusive makerspaces. In the first part of the workshop I presented some of the results from my research on diversity and inclusivity issues in makerspaces, then I opened the floor up to a roundtable discussion with other
I’m currently on a research trip in New York that just happens to coincide with the annual World Maker Faire, held in NYC every September. Needless to say I jumped at the chance to check out one of the biggest Maker Faires in the world. This year was the 9th World Maker Faire, and as
This year was my second visit to Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s hacker camping festival, and by a weird twist of fate this year’s camp was held at the former site of a music festival I used to work at around 10 years ago. The new site was a lot bigger than its former location in
Earlier this month the Tate Modern hosted a mini exhibit on shared machine shops (i.e. makerspaces) as part of its Tate Exchange program. It featured a couple of photos from my fieldwork in the USA this summer alongside an audio piece featuring recordings from my hackerspace back home in Brighton. Read more about the exhibition here.
I’m currently working as a research assistant for a team at UCL’s Institute of Education that’s investigating the educational and identity equity potential of makerspaces for young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Back in July we organised a research symposium at UCL’s Institute of Making. Read their write-up of the event here.
This April, Kat Braybrooke and I gathered 28 brave souls to explore algorithmic ghosts in Brighton — a city known for its blending of new-age spiritualities and digital medias, but perhaps not yet for its ghosts — through the launch of a new psychogeography tour for the Haunted Random Forest festival. Check out our write up on the Furtherfield blog.
I spent the past couple of weekends getting my geek on at Electromagnetic Field, a camping festival for hackers and makers, and Nine Worlds, a fan culture convention that covers everything from Joss Whedon to roller derby. EMF camp has been running every two years since 2012 but I’d never made it along before: it’s