Abstract Makerspaces are often defined as locations that bring together people, equipment, and materials for the purpose of Do It Yourself (DIY) activities, leading to democratic innovations. Less attention is given to alternatives to DIY approaches to enable successful learning environments for women from refugee and migrant backgrounds. By taking an ethnographic approach across nine makerspaces, this paper studies the learning pathways offered in each makerspace. Our findings examine (1) the efficacy of learning modalities to foster inclusion; (2) bridging pathways for women, refugees, and migrants; (3) staff expertise; and (4) facilitating pathways into employment. This paper extends the discussion from ‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) to ‘Do It Together’ (DIT), highlighting DIT as a key approach to fostering diversity and inclusion. Finally, we contribute five strategies to provide a DIT environment and inclusive learning pathways for marginalized groups.

While HCI scholars have examined how e-textiles serve to bridge the gender divide, there is little research into refugee, asylum seeker and low socioeconomic migrant women (WRAMs) and e-textiles. This paper presents the results of a series of two community-led participatory design workshops to study the factors that enable these women, who face intersecting barriers, to engage in STEM oriented making activities. Our findings examine 1) deficit discourse and strengths-based narratives; 2) bridging STEM skills into a culturally safe and tailored learning environment; 3) bridging commitment through commercial viability; and 4) the benefits of organizational partnering to bridge skills and diverse communities. This paper makes three contributions. First, we offer a strengths-based counter narrative on the abilities, assets and motivations of WRAMs to engage in makerspaces, particularly STEM skills. Second, we offer a discussion on the implications of racial capitalism and internalized bias which limits resources, research and practice with WRAMs and consequently, technological design and production. Third, we extend the work of Buechley and contribute five strategies to bridge WRAMs into STEM oriented makerspace activities to build a ''new clubhouse''. We discuss the vital role researchers, technologists, makerspaces and financiers must play in supporting these new clubhouses to facilitate strengths-based narratives, harnessing and amplifying skills-based assets, in order to diversify who shapes technology and thus what is shaped.

While varying degrees of participatory methods are often explored by the HCI community to enable design with different user groups, this paper seeks to add weight to the burgeoning demand for community-led design when engaging with diverse groups at the intersections of marginalisation. This paper presents a 24-month-long qualitative study, where the authors observed a community-based organisation that empowers refugee and migrant women in Australia through making. We report how the organisation led its own process to pivot from face-to-face to online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing the design and delivery of an app and the intersectional challenges faced by the women as they learnt to navigate online making. This paper expands feminist intersectional praxis in HCI to new contexts and critiques the positionality of researchers in this work. It contributes to the literature on design justice, providing an exemplar of how community-led design more effectively dismantles the compounding constraints experienced by intersectional communities. This paper also argues that the ethos of care and safe spaces, which are central to black feminist thought, are vital to community-led design and underpin the 10 design justice principles when executed in practice.

In this paper, we focus on makerspace practices that can hinder or enable access for under-resourced women of colour who are novices to making, predominantly migrants and refugee women. We report on a 21 month long ethnographic fieldwork at nine makerspaces across two metropolitan Australian cities. The findings present barriers and opportunities around access of under-resourced women of colour into makerspaces. We present these findings through four themes: first impressions and visual representations; dimensions of the enabling environment; role of community partnerships; and intersectional identities of women. We conclude by discussing three contributions this paper makes to the HCI and CSCW literature, with supporting lessons and recommendations so that makerspaces no longer encode the involvement of only certain types of users (predominantly well-educated white males or white females), to the exclusion of women at the intersectional margins. If makerspaces can facilitate an enabling environment appropriate to be inclusive of women who face intersecting oppressions, the benefits of the maker movement can expand substantially.

The purpose of this pictorial is to provide a unique perspective, through an autoethnographic account, of the experiences a woman of colour may have, as she seeks to enter into the world of makerspaces. As an intersectional woman, conducting this autoethnography is a means to assess the cultural and gender diversity of makerspaces in an Australian metro city, and their practices to foster inclusivity. Over a period of 6 months, the lead author explored 4 different types of makerspaces. The autoethnography found cultural and gendered roles and biases in the physical and socio-cultural environments of each makerspace, as well as in terminologies, tools, materials and learning pathways that constrained her involvement. The research identifies important factors that could be amplified to increase the involvement of intersectional women and the foundations for new guidelines and activities that would enable makerspaces to improve their diversity and inclusivity.