The Shadow Rhetorics of Innovation: Maker Culture, Gender, and Technology

Abstract

What are the rhetorics of innovation? This project examines the compelling, persuasive, and often alluring features of innovation. Specifically, this project contends that popularized conceptualizations of innovation affectively shape tech environments in ways that ultimately (dis)place women-identified users and their contributions from these spaces. Compounding popularized conceptualizations of innovation are the silent, yet paradoxically loud, rhetorics of innovation where marginalized communities are invisibilized and innovative making practices undertaken by women are underrepresented. This project pays particular attention to these thresholds and limitations of innovation or, in other words, the shadow rhetorics that are always already present in prominent discourses surrounding innovation. In this context, the shadow rhetorics of innovation disrupt common assumptions that undermine the alluring features of innovation. The project focuses on a specific brand of innovation. Analyses are contextualized and examined within the Maker Movement—a social phenomenon that emerged from Silicon Valley. Using affect theory as the primary theoretical framework for this project, I conducted a mixed-methods approach to examine how innovation has been conceptualized in past, present, and future time frames. In the project, I generate topic models on a textual corpus of twenty innovation websites, analyze pre-event survey responses from a women’s-only hackathon, and examine data collected from an institutional review board approved study on making in a makerspace. These three methods function well independently to generate data about the shadow rhetorics of innovation as a persuasive mechanism that continues to shape the innovation environments. Importantly, however, they also function integrally: the results of each study inform the analyses of the others. Based on my analysis of these data sets, I argue that innovation-centric environments are engrained with gender biases that negatively shape the socio-technical relationships that women-identified users develop within these environments.