I have produced two exhibitions about my research.

DIY WIFI: Making homebrew high-technology in Australian suburban backyards
An exhibition of ethnographic data during fieldwork, Adelaide, Australia
January 2007

This exhibition of my ethnographic work-in-progress was held in the backyard of a suburban house within the WiFi groups’ network coverage. Participants, predominantly respondents and family members, interacted with my research by literally entering into it, touching, talking about and eventually taking away objects, field notes, photos and sketches. This site-specific multi-dimensional interpretation of my research enabled a tactile, visual and sensual engagement with my key findings in a way that differs to that of reading a textual argument or hearing a presentation. Feedback was immediate and invaluable to my ongoing analysis.

“Makers”, “Mashers” and “Mods”: An ethnography of Australian backyard technologists in suburban Australia
Goldsmiths College, London, UK
24-31 October 2009

This exhibition coincided with a conference hosted by the Sociology Department for the 50th anniversary of ‘The Sociological Imagination’ (Mills 1959). It explored the innovative practices of suburban Australian technology makers operating on the fringes of established centres of innovation. More broadly it reflected upon the role of objects in the making of sociological knowledge. Drawing on ethnographies of two not-for-profit technology groups (a volunteer community WiFi network and a bicycle making club) in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, the exhibition revealed how members collectively customise and adapt discarded, freely available or cheaply purchased materials using improvised methods and their own backyards, re-inscribing them with new meanings and re-imagined possibilities of use. Foregrounding the ‘homebrew high-tech’ objects and practices of these ‘backyard technologists’ as well as my own methods of making sociological knowledge (blogposts, fieldnotes, photos, sketches, objects and film), the exhibition aimed to generate dialogue between the central themes of these multi-dimensional materials and, at the same time, open up for discussion, improvised, hands-on and object-oriented ways of thinking about and through knowledge production.

Although many researchers seek to expose their findings to as wide an audience as possible, the actual making of knowledge into anything other than text is unusual and an area that remains critically undeveloped.