Building New Clubhouses: Bridging Refugee and Migrant Women into Technology Design and Production by Leveraging Assets

TL;DR

This paper explores how refugee and migrant women can be supported in engaging with STEM through community-led participatory design workshops, emphasizing strengths-based narratives and organizational partnerships to foster inclusive technology making.

Contribution

It introduces five strategies to integrate refugee and migrant women into STEM makerspaces, emphasizing strengths-based approaches and addressing systemic biases.

Findings

Refugee and migrant women possess valuable assets and motivations for engaging in STEM.

Organizational partnerships enhance access and skills development for WRAMs.

Strengths-based narratives positively influence WRAMs' participation in makerspaces.

Abstract

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 A. deficit discourse and strengths-based narratives, B. bridging STEM skills into a culturally safe and tailored learning environment, C. bridging commitment through commercial viability and D. 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.