I spent a fair amount of time searching before I found Deb Chachra, Professor of Engineering at Olin College, a small undergraduate university in Massachusetts, USA.

I was instantly struck by her enthusiasm, inspired by her energy, and by her views on education. Listening to her speak in Sources and Methods #30: Deb Chachra (2016), Chachra describes her article in the Atlantic, Why I am not a Maker, which deals with maker culture, the social history of makers-of-things as elitist and overvalued while calling out the stigmatization of those who do the labour. She speaks of how we learn from the making that we put out into the world, and of having a zibaldone, and of libraries. She speaks of education models, of how the factory model of education is about quality control and cost efficiency (which we see a lot of in Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech). In Gratitude for Invisible Systems: One way to improve democracy is for more people to appreciate its complex technological underpinnings, Chachra speaks of invisible systems that underpin our democratic society, systems that we subscribe to as members of citizenry and only notice when these systems fail (think pandemic). She also wrote Care at Scale, centring infrastructural citizenship that begins with place-based learning and reads like a manifesto where we follow Chachra on an analysis of interconnectivity. On Twitter, she shares variations on the intersections of education, engineering and science, gender studies, technology and culture, and the environment. She writes a weekly newsletter, Metafoundry, you can also find her on Instagram, and she is writing a book on Infrastructural Systems.