Building (critical) futures of making and peace in Northern Ireland...
Belgium's heartbreaking terror attacks lie heavily on my heart today, as I'm sure they do for many others. In these moments, it can be easy to lose hope for a more peaceful and multicultural future. And yet, reminders of local peacebuilding efforts in neighbourhoods around the world continue to emerge when we look for them. Here's a small example.
Last week, I was invited to the city of Belfast in Northern Ireland (known largely to foreigners as the site of a series of equally sad conflicts from its past) to speak about my research into critical making and fabrication futures for the Maker Assembly NI gathering, organized by the inspiring Pip Shea and Irish hackspace Farset Labs.
For our panel on speculative making, curator Nora O'Murchu and I were asked to discuss the supports needed to maintain a critical forecast of makerspaces as the idea of digital making becomes more accessible. Nora provided some of her thoughts on making practice as informed by her work with the University of Limerick (and the wonderful Cat++ programming language). Other inspiring makers like Hanna Stewart from the RCA Future Makerspaces Project and Javier Buron from FabLab Limerick discussed sustainability and governance of maker networks.
Meanwhile, I shared two different potential futures of making (presentation here), based on initial research for my PhD into makerspace cultures around the world. The first future (of many possible) that I see being built is a top-down one, dictated by corporate entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley futurecasters, where makerspaces are framed around Western leisure and profit, not critical perspectives. The second future, however, moves from the bottom-up, where diverse, autonomous spaces around the world are fostered, building local making and fabrication practices that are sustainable, critical and in collaboration with communities.
What I was most impressed by, though, was the high level of consciousness amongst local participants regarding the complex sociopolitical and economic circumstances of their region -- and the various projects they have launched to strengthen peacekeeping efforts through local fabrication at spaces for making across the city, led by Irish communities themselves.
"Violence has stopped here," Adam Wallace and Eamon Durey from the new FabLab NI told us, "but there are still undercurrents of extremism". The Troubles are over, but Belfast remains highly divided between Catholic and Protestant neighbourhood territories -- so the idea of shared space remains challenging.
And that's exactly why locals believe spaces like fab labs are important in building non-contested public community centres for everyone. From workshops that give local youth qualifications to create their own local technology enterprises in marginalized areas to programmes on hyrdoponics and plant processing to the use of open source practices and machines, many local organizers believe these spaces can help build new kinds of community - and manufacturing - that revitalize as well as educate. "It's not a classroom, it's not a college, and it's not a community centre. It's something that we've never had here before," they told us.
The discussions that emerged were equally interesting. Would efforts like these build a truly egalitarian future for the region, audience members wondered, or another form of New Labour-era, Claire Bishop-esque social control? A local trade union representative mentioned similar initiatives like the inspiring Lukas Plan technology community hubs that were opened across in London in the 1970s and then closed down due to Thatcher-era cuts to social programs. How could Northern Ireland's initiatives be more sustainable, longer-lasting and provide jobs at the end where services and goods are created for the community, by the community?
In such circumstances, where the worlds we discuss remain so new, their machines so shiny, there are often more questions than there are answers - but it was a good sign to see people asking them so thoughtfully last week. I now look forward to seeing how the powerful local mandate of shared machine shops to "bring manufacturing and technology back into our communities, this time with co-ops" will help build peaceful and empowering futures across Northern Ireland.
