Becca Rose
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Becca Rose's MPhil/PhD Design research project
Potato Computer Club: enlivening computing pedagogies with more-than-human feminist practice
Potato Computer Club explores how computing can be taught with more-than-human and feminist pedagogies. Through the practice of arts workshops, I experiment with assemblages of electronics, coding, and potatoes as unlikely companions. Potatoes become pedagogical figures (Haraway, 2008) that support lively, affective and entangled relationships with computers.
Working with potatoes brings qualities such as failure, temporal shifts, collectivity, care, humour and decay into computing education. Storytelling and making with figures engages the whole self (hooks, 1994; 2003) and troubles narratives of control, mastery, and abstraction. The arts workshops evolve into collective club-making, where participants co-create knowledge and define potato computing together.
This thesis offers two key contributions. First, it develops oddkin computing pedagogies, grounded in potato figures and extended to other unexpected companions such as teddy bears, cats, mud, and rubbish. Building on the concept of oddkin (Haraway, 2016), the thesis explores how pedagogical figures bring their own registers of meaning into learning contexts.
With oddkin computing pedagogies, I offer approaches for enlivening how we teach computing. Second, the thesis contributes to understandings of practice-research. Knowledge emerges through a commitment to practice: collaborating with others, working with matter, and staying with moments of failure. This approach is shaped by diffractive methodology (Barad, 2007), which values situated practices, material encounters, and epistemological plurality.
Supervisors
- Dr Tobie Kerridge
- Prof Tara Page
Researcher Biography
Becca's practice-research explores feminist technology, materiality, and DIWO approaches (do it with others). They work in community contexts with embodied approaches to technologies, and develop experimental digital work with tactile processes.