#143: Infrastructuring for Climate Justice in STEM-Rich Making

This study employs critical participatory design-based research to investigate how integrating infrastructuring practices into a community-based STEM-rich maker program supports youth in responding to urgent, felt challenges of climate change through their making, while also promoting sustainable communities. Grounded in the experiences of middle school youth participating in a year-long, community-centered program, our findings highlight how infrastructural resources (material, relational, social/emotional, and intellectual) enabled youth to engage in meaningful, climate-focused making. These resources became a site for incubating ways of knowing and being, as they emerged as connective tissue linking people, practices, and contexts through acts of making for change. They fostered solidarity and shared responsibility by positioning youth as active agents in generating educative, solution-oriented artifacts for climate justice and reorganizing physical spaces using maker materials. We argue that integrating infrastructural resources into community-based STEM-rich making supports youth-led responses to climate change and advances justice-oriented outcomes.