A Node on the Constellation: The Role of Feminist Makerspaces in Building and Sustaining Alternative Cultures of Technology Production

TL;DR

This paper explores how feminist makerspaces sustain themselves through care, solidarity, and shared governance, serving as counterspaces that embody feminist values in technology production.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into the organizational practices that enable feminist makerspaces to endure over time amidst structural challenges.

Findings

Sustainability relies on care-driven stewardship and shared governance.

Feminist makerspaces act as prefigurative counterspaces embodying feminist values.

Solidarity with justice movements supports long-term endurance.

Abstract

Feminist makerspaces offer community led alternatives to dominant tech cultures by centering care, mutual aid, and collective knowledge production. While prior CSCW research has explored their inclusive practices, less is known about how these spaces sustain themselves over time. Drawing on interviews with 18 founders and members across 8 U.S. feminist makerspaces as well as autoethnographic reflection, we examine the organizational and relational practices that support long-term endurance. We find that sustainability is not achieved through growth or institutionalization, but through care-driven stewardship, solidarity with local justice movements, and shared governance. These social practices position feminist makerspaces as prefigurative counterspaces - sites that enact, rather than defer, feminist values in everyday practice. This paper offers empirical insight into how feminist makerspaces persist amid structural precarity, and highlights the forms of labor and coalition-building that underpin alternative sociotechnical infrastructures.