Building New Clubhouses: Bridging Refugee and Migrant Women into Technology Design and Production by Leveraging Assets
Sonali Hedditch, Dhaval Vyas

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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInnovation and Socioeconomic Development · Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences
