Hacking Diversity

"Hacking Diversity takes us into the hackerspaces, makerspaces, and unconferences where diversity advocates hack their social order to open up volunteer technologies along multiple dimensions. Dunbar-Hester shows that much more than 'stuff' is produced-issues of gender, race, power, and class emerge and are interrogated. This is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how diversity becomes productive in open technology movements and corporate tech cultures."-Sareeta Amrute, University of Washington
"This book provides a clear-eyed critical exploration of diversity advocacy within today's market-saturated culture of open technology, fractured by the sediments of racial capitalism. Dunbar-Hester brilliantly combines historical analysis with ethnographic insights to show why DIY interventions by voluntaristic open technologists and computing devotees, however well-meaning, struggle to resolve the foundational tensions between individual freedom and collective emancipation."-Paula Chakravartty, New York University
"Written with grace, clarity, and generosity, Hacking Diversity critically probes inclusion initiatives in open content and hacker communities. Giving credit where it is due, Dunbar-Hester shows how diversity advocacy engendered laudable changes that nevertheless have fallen short of securing substantive equity and justice. This widely relevant book will become central to reorienting the public debate around diversity in technology."-Gabriella Coleman, McGill University
"Unraveling threads of identity, open technology, and activism over the past decade, Hacking Diversity sympathetically but critically analyzes the daily life, utopian desires, and critical awareness of participants in hackerspaces, free software communities, maker movements, and activist tech collectives. Dunbar-Hester reveals the poignant tensions at work in communities struggling to address problems of global political inequality with new technologies and practices that promise liberation-but all too rarely deliver it."-Christopher M. Kelty, University of California, Los Angeles
"Well-written, sophisticated, theoretically limber, and often clever and humorous, Hacking Diversity unpacks the concept of diversity advocacy and how to create, nurture, and sustain feminist hacker/maker spaces. It will make an impact in feminist media studies, critical communication studies, digital activism studies, and science and technology studies."-Leslie Regan Shade, University of Toronto