Final Project Reflection

Julia Proctor
HONORS 212A
DIY and Maker Culture
Spring 2015

Looking through the Lens to Magnify Feminist Issues

Reflection on the Making Process -

Something that I have always done in projects that I was assigned was really taken advantage of the opportunity to explore part of my own identity and figuring out how to express that in the work that I present to my professors and advisors. It makes the project more interesting, personal, and ensures that the person completing the project is invested. I also firmly believe that you can’t contribute to a project in the same manner if you don’t have a personal motivation for the project. In this case, I am a molecular biology student at the University of Washington and really love everything about science as it relates to life. I am also really passionate about human rights movements and seeking equality for all humans.

Feminism is one of the examples of political statements that we covered in our class. However, I did not feel that it was correctly and fully represented. There is a lot to cover and so it would be impossible to cover all of the messages of feminism, but the issues are issues that I, as a female, inherently face every day and so it was a message that I wanted to try my best to convey. I think that a lot of people overlook feminism and consider feminists a group of radical women that want to eradicate men. This is definitely radical, but it’s not true. At least in my eyes, and most of my peers’ eyes, feminism is really about equality between the genders. It may seem that society has worked through a lot of these issues and given women rights, since we are now allowed to vote. This was a win in the books, but women are still consistently paid considerably less and significantly underrepresented in many fields, including STEM.

This project allowed me to explore the intersections between feminism and STEM, which are both significant parts of my identity. The underrepresentation of women can be alienating and intimidating when working in the fields, and this should never be a factor in deciding what discipline to study. This is what I wanted to be examined in my project. The next part was figuring out how to represent my political statements on feminism within my project.

I show how I ended up representing this and what my final project looks like in the documentation part of this assignment. There were a lot of different ideas of what critical making really meant that were presented to us in class through the readings that we were assigned. For me, critical making is really about the little lessons that you learn during the making process. I think that during the making process you can really take the time to reflect on what you know, though the focus is usually on what you didn’t know and how you coped with the lack of information to make your project work.

Through the process of building my microscope, I learned a lot. Some of the things were technical, such as how to use a drill. Other things were also slightly technical in nature, but exposed me to things that I wouldn’t otherwise ever have had the access to use, such as the laser cutter, which I used to cut my plexiglass. I really ended up doing this because my original plan didn’t work and I didn’t know what other options I had or what to do. What I really feel that I walked away from this class with was the knowledge that I have the capacity to make things and that there are a lot of materials and mediums in our everyday lives that we don’t necessarily consider.

The process of making teaches us a lot, whether technical or theoretical. During the making of my project I had to ask for a lot of help in performing tasks that I didn’t know much about. When I first went to the MakerSpace, I was intimidated by the girl to guy ratio and felt that I would be judged if I asked how to use certain equipment. However, after reaching a point where I had no idea what was going on, I went to ask a staff member for help and was relieved to find that there were other people that also did not know how to use the equipment in the space and that we had to ask another person for assistance. The staff member that I initially asked also got to learn about the equipment that I wanted to use and how it worked. For me, it was an important message to see that I was not the only one that did not know how to do things, and that learning was acceptable and encouraged. This was an important barrier for me to cross in continuing to make and expanding my skill set of things that I am able to do.