Description
Book SynopsisMaking hacks into reality. It engages matter in ways that trespass the boundaries between the civic realm and the state-assigned laws. Even with primitive tools and skills, designing and making can break open and repurpose arrangements of power. The proof is that some crafts are so controversiallock-picking, moonshining, shoplifting, smuggling, sabotagethat they need to be controlled or even outlawed. When designers and makers touch on these contested realms, they run into trouble. This highly original book explores how the material power of design and making can challenge arrangements of agency and domination. Unpacking a series of conflicting casesfrom illegal making to the strategic and civic use of crafts to manifest radical alternatives to the current orderit shows how designers and makers can use even basic tools to work towards more.
Trade ReviewThis book will change your understanding of activism, design, and politics, fundamentally. Buy it, steal it, or read it, but most importantly: start redesigning things in your life! -- Stellan Vinthagen, Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance and Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
Making Trouble is a fabulous book. It offers an original and timely intervention in scholarly and activist debates and has the added benefit of being beautifully written. I fully expect it will become an instant classic in cross-disciplinary research and contentious political practice. -- Victoria Hattam, Professor of Politics, New School for Social Research, New York
Table of ContentsPreface Back to Matter Activist Making Affirmative Making
1. Power in the Making Primitive Making Matters and Materials Making between Matter and Meta
2. State Metaxu Metaxu State Space - State Matter State Meta in the Matter
3. Making Matters Making Leverage Finding Material Leverage The Contents of Political Matters
4. Making Agency Making Change, Making Resistance Making Material Agency Manipulating Meta
5. Doing and sitting Sitting is Not Only Sitting Royal Crafts and Citizen Consumption Resistant Sitting Seated Democracies
6. Recursive Matters Intensity vs Scale Making Means and Ends Meet Pulsation
7. Strategic Objectiles Material Mobilization Tactical Presence and its Limitations Stitch for Senate
8. Material Counter-intelligence Material Intelligence Artus and Metis The Cookies of Cunning
9. Brewing Dissent Controlled Substances, Controlled Crafts Misuse and Mischief Buckets of Evidence
10. Designing Back Making Civics Tangible Design and Activism Material Civic Dissidence
11. Trouble Making and Counter-crafts Dangerous Makings Mapping Material Activism
12. Make it Simple Making Action Spaces Making Calisthenics Stay Matter!
