As digital media making becomes increasingly popularized in classrooms, media and arts educators are faced with not only familiarizing digital technologies for curricular planning but also improvising with these unwieldy objects during pedagogical exchanges. Drawing from my five-week action research project, teaching and learning digital art making through digital game modifications, this paper explores the repeated moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles during pedagogical practices through the metaphor of troubleshooting that guided how we framed and approached these troubles. Specifically, I argue that to troubleshoot is to standardize our situated contexts to universal terms, to engage in a relationship premised on the framework of control, and to invest in the temporal order of technological development as predetermined knowledge. As such, I foreground a desire for a different metaphor and turn towards the metaphor of troublecaring to speculate how to respond to the offers of inquiry made by these moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles.

As digital media making becomes increasingly popularized in classrooms across levels and locales with science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education being celebrated as the touchstone of contemporary pedagogy, there exists an ever-exceeding horizon of new, emerging, and often digital technologies for media and arts educators to learn for the purpose of curricular planning and execution. But, even as educators become familiarized with these technologies across stratified fault lines of access and literacy, we face technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles at every corner of the pedagogical encounter that uproot any sense of security gathered through familiarity. The projector won’t project. The software froze. The Wi-Fi won’t connect. What do we do, then? We engage in “situated actions” (Suchman 1987, 3) and figure out how to work with what we have. As many have noted, constantly improvising with these unwieldy and disobedient technological objects through the troubles they introduce during pedagogical exchange is a daily routine for pedagogues (Black and Browning 2011; Delacruz 2004, 2009).

If we take seriously that pedagogical encounters are sites of knowledge production, then we need to pay attention to the language we use during that encounter, which in turn shapes, frames, and constrains what knowledge can be made. Drawing from my five-week action research project, teaching and learning digital art making through digital game modifications, this paper is an attempt at “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016, 1) of technologies in pedagogical practices to rethink what knowledge is and can be made through how we frame, approach, and relate to the troubles that new, emerging, and digital technologies introduce to the classroom. Specifically, this paper asks, What happens when we practice troubleshooting as opposed to troublecaring technologies? What ways of relating do these metaphors enact? How do these relations frame knowledge production during pedagogical practice? By investigating the metaphor of troubleshooting used by youth participants and myself during the workshops, this paper excavates the assumptions carried over that frame how we can and cannot relate to our technologies, knowledge, and each other during our knowledge production process. In turn, I end with the metaphor of caregiving as a method for imagining troublecaring as ways we might relate to technologies differently.

Why should we care about moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles during pedagogical encounters? I emphasize care here as “care becomes a tool for critical political analysis when we use this concept to reveal relationships of power” (Tronto 1993, 172). As María Puig de la Bellacasa emphasizes, care is “noninnocent” (2017, 90) insofar as care is often romanticized under the “logic of binary gender code and normative relations of care” (Sharma 2020, 176). Who cares? Who is taking care of this? Who performs the caregiving? Is the care received? A relation undergirded by care participates in the power dynamics of hierarchical structures, and attending to care clarifies the directionality of giving and receiving. As Joan Tronto’s “four phases of caring” (1993, 105) makes explicit, the labor of care can be differentiated between “caring about” (106), as a general awareness about needs existing, and “care-giving” (106), as the physical labor involved with meeting those needs. I come to care about these repeated moments during teaching as I experience the unequal relations in caregiving technological troubles that shape what can be known by whom. Guided by critical feminist pedagogies’ wisdom of centering our lived experiences about and during pedagogical encounters as knowledge production (Kishimoto and Mwangi 2009), I invite you to care about these moments with me in ways that hopefully lead us closer towards figuring out how to practice caregiving technological troubles together.

First, we need to care about these moments of technological trouble because they are precisely when our relationalities, with technologies, knowledge, and each other, are made, unmade, and continually remade. What are technologies, with layered interests built and invested into them, telling us when they don’t work? Often framed as a problem to be solved, trouble is a central feminist concern insofar as many question who and what is positioned as the trouble and troubling as well as how we ought to relate to trouble. In investigating how racism intersects with computational logics undergirding digital machines, Ruha Benjamin argues that encounters with unanticipated trouble that disrupt the seamless flow of using these technologies provide “powerful opportunities to examine the overall system” (2019, 24). Given, these moments demand situated actions from us to engage in acts of care to repair that remakes our relations. As Steven Jackson explains, repair is “the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished” (2014, 222). Through the act of trying to make technologies work again, we can observe and disturb the various “default discrimination” (Benjamin 2019, 55) enacted by technologies when they’re working smoothly and invisibly in the background.

However, as Sara Ahmed writes, when feminist killjoys name the harms caused by white supremist heteropatriarchal capitalism that need repairing, feminists and feminisms themselves are often perceived as the problem that’s causing trouble (2017, 37). Because to take time to engage in careful repair disrupts the normalized temporality of technological progress, trouble is positioned as unwanted delays. In rejecting the default relation to trouble as something bad, Amanda Phillips affirms “the importance of conflict and disagreement for political change” (2020, 182) while causing good trouble in pursuit of “a fair distribution of power” (178), particularly in the context of confronting digital gaming cultures. As Phillips puts it, “Trouble is a glitch in the matrix. Trouble is a woman who stands out. Trouble is cruzando la frontera” (11). In becoming “the incompatibly queer, raced, classed, and sexed broken-down machine” (Sharma 2020, 173) causing trouble in the seamless timeline of technological advancement, “feminists are rendered an always already obsolete technology that isn’t working properly” (173) by insisting on opening a temporal space to relate to other technologies differently. In other words, by staying with and becoming the trouble as broken machines that won’t stop taking up space about the ways in which we’re out of line and time with other technologies, we are engaging in a feminist “mode of resistance” (174) that imagines different technological futures through inhabiting alternative temporalities and making alternative relationalities.

Second, we need to care about these moments specifically during pedagogical encounters because these sites are important locations of knowledge production. Pedagogical encounters are “a location of possibility” (hooks 1994, 207) about what can be known by whom and how, especially when we play with the various constraints placed upon it (Lucero 2016). In popular discourses on education, many literatures exist to advocate for the incorporation of new technologies for reaching some fabulous futuristic destination with supposedly “all” peoples. As Anita Say Chan argues, “digital technologies today have come to be imagined as agents of reform whose impacts readily take effect as much at scales of the global as they at the level of the individual” (2013, 4). However, the problems of “fitting” in practice that come along with these technologies as sociotechnical systems are seldom foregrounded, analyzed, and addressed. As critical feminist pedagogue bell hooks says, “more radical subject matter does not create liberatory pedagogy, [and] a simple practice like including personal experience may be more constructively challenging than simply changing the curriculum” (1994, 148). In other words, that new app will not save us. Instead, naming the various constraints rooted in our lived experiences with these apps at the pedagogical site provides the grounds for making different kinds of knowledges and livable worlds. In expanding the notion of curriculum to encompass these experiences, Deborah Osberg and Gert Biesta explain that “knowledge is understood, rather, to ‘emerge’ as we, as human beings, participate in the world” (2008, 313). In this sense, knowledge produced through pedagogical encounters “should not be pre-determined before the ‘event’ of their emergence” (314). As such, they argue that an emergent curriculum describes not only the inclusion of specific emergent knowledge as content area, such as the inclusion of emerging technologies and critiques of them into a lesson, but also the reorientation of subjectivities involved in practicing the lesson, such as how we relate to our technologies and vice versa. By caring about these moments in pedagogical encounters, perhaps we can devise a fuller understanding of the knowledge that is made, or made impossible, with technologies in pedagogical practice.

Third, we need to care about these recurring moments as they are examples of pedagogical constraints that educators across levels navigate daily to produce “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1991, 111) about technologies in practice that are often under-acknowledged. With the labor of teaching being historically feminized across primary and secondary schooling and continually distinguished from and deprioritized as peripheral to research in higher education (Boyle 2004; Chen 2015), to center educators and the knowledge they produce during teaching is to reject the devaluing of feminized labor and the idea that teaching is not research (aka traditionally legible forms of knowledge production). In the field of media and arts education, many scholars draw on their own teaching experiences to critique the dominant logic of new technologies = social progress manifesting in education. While “corporations, governments, and universities (who rely even more heavily on research funds provided by the first two entities) are promoting technology in all its guise” (Congdon 1997, 112), the dissemination and adoption is unevenly distributed across racial, class, gender, and national lines (Morbey 1997). Against this logic that serves commodity market expansions at the expense of reproducing existing inequities, they advocate a need to reject this preoccupation with accumulating stuff by taking the time to consider “carefully how we plan to use any new technological tools that become available to us” (Gregory 1997, 166). In that vein, many scholars share their negotiations and resistances in their pedagogies with technologies under this reigning logic (Taylor 2004; Garoian and Gaudelius 2001; Lin and Bruce 2013; Rhoades et al. 2013; Keifer-Boyd 2017).

Similarly, in the field of feminist technoscience, many scholars also center their pedagogical practices as grounds for producing knowledge about our technocultures (FemTechNet, n.d.; SCRAM, n.d.; Rault 2015; Cong-Huyen et al. 2017; Cowan 2018; Hoagland 2018; York and Conley 2019). By centering educators’ knowledge produced across these moments, we can begin to outline the constraints around teaching with/through/around/about technologies that also places feminist technoscience scholarship in dialog with education, more generally, and feminist media and arts education scholarship, more specifically.

If we care about technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles during pedagogical encounters as these moments are openings to probe assumptions around digital technologies that manifest unequal relations, this question follows: How can we practice caregiving technological troubles, or troublecaring, during pedagogical encounters that take up these openings to remake these relations? As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha argues, offering a disability justice framework to practices of care, there is no “one right way to do ‘it’—it being the ways we offer or organize care” (2018, 66). Care cannot be separated from the specific situated context from which it unfolds (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), and it is in the relentless attempts at caregiving, despite unending troubles, that care “involves living with the erratic” (Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010, 10). Building on the metaphor of caregiving as a method for attending to trouble, what does troublecaring offer us in weaving different relations with technologies? As my attempt at troublecaring, instead of troubleshooting, technologies in pedagogical practice, I reflect on one set of such troubling encounters in the following.

As a doctoral student in art education in 2015, I developed the Minecraft Modification Workshops, for youths from sixth to twelfth grade, which was to be held in a public library’s loosely structured after-school program¹ located in a Midwest US city. It grew out of previous workshop series I’ve taught at the same library, where youths who frequent the library² were particularly interested in learning about media making related to digital games. While the youth library patrons³ expressed these interests, the library’s existing infrastructure struggled to meet these interests.

In terms of staff, most of the librarians working with the teens (known as Teen Librarians) have been practicing for over a decade, and they expressed a disconnect with the emerging technologies that they were being requested to support. As one senior librarian described to me, she is not “tech-savvy like young people” (Anonymous librarian, spoken to author, July 21, 2015). As such, the library’s official programming centered on analog media, and they relied on only two recently hired Teen Librarians and sporadic visiting instructors/volunteers to deliver ad-hoc programming that centered around youth’s interests. As a visiting artist instructor, I came to be involved through a collaborative effort between the nearby university that I was attending and the library’s expressed need for digital-media-related activity support. However, this context is not unique to this library. With limited budget, public libraries have historically privileged the acquisition of objects for providing the public with “materials and technology access” (Agosto et al. 2016, 248) as their main service, as opposed to providing programming on how to use, navigate, and evaluate these materials. Furthermore, despite the availability of digital literacy programs in libraries, they are primarily adult-centered and not youth-centered; as the American Library Association’s (2015) Digital Inclusion Survey in 2014 shows, only about one-third of libraries provide digital-related programming specifically for youths.

In terms of technologies, the nearly one-thousand-square-foot Teen Space section was furnished with around twenty desktop computers, along with books and seating areas. While this may seem spacious and resource-sufficient in comparison to many libraries, its lack becomes apparent when considering that it serves over one hundred youth visitors daily from a public middle school next door.⁴ During the busy after-school hours, youth visitors needed to sign up to be placed in line for using the desktops, and they rotated off the desktop after twenty minutes of use. Furthermore, while visitors were broadly given access to the desktops with internet, strict limits were placed upon how the computers could be used. For example, digital games were not allowed to be installed on the desktops, and only games on webpages were accessible. Once, I met with the library’s IT personnel to request access to the restricted temp folders on the desktops for upcoming workshops to be held in the Teen Space. However, the IT personnel denied the access request for fear that it would make the larger library network vulnerable. To carry out the workshops, my supportive faculty members worked with me to secure a public engagement grant from our university, and we were able to purchase seven laptops⁵ with slightly fewer restrictions on use to support this programming in a children’s room used for book readings across from Teen Space. As indicative of what Kristin Congdon observes, while educational institutions are embracing technologies, the cost for adoption is prohibitive unless they can “work through a nearby college or university” (1997, 109).

Drawing from my experiences of teaching through the library’s constraints and inspired by literature on critical pedagogy I read in graduate school at the time, I was particularly interested in figuring out how to practice critical pedagogy with and through games, the objects that gravitated my youth interlocutors’ attention. Specifically, I questioned how games can be mobilized for social justice through critical play (Flanagan 2009). Thus, I developed this workshop series with the intention for it to be included at the center of my dissertation inquiry, along the following learning objective: participants will be able to play Minecraft critically by critiquing digital games as technocultural systems and by modding games to create alterative worlds for social justice. The workshops were carried out from February to March 2016 over the span of five weeks⁶ with myself as the facilitator and seven youth participants⁷ through an action research methodology. With its emphasis on reflexive practice for social change that collapsed the distinction between researcher and teacher, this methodology allowed me to mobilize my teaching practice for and as research theorizations (May 1993; Acuff 2014).

However, the initial learning objective became increasingly unachievable when the digital technologies we used repeatedly didn’t work and refused to cooperate. On paper, we seemed to have overcome the obstacles against these workshops: we sourced the required technologies across space; we gathered people with varying expertise and experiences who had strong passion for this work; we found the overlapping time for us to regularly convene. Nevertheless, the materiality of technologies needs regular maintenance to stay in working order (Jackson 2014). In our case, these maintenance works were often haphazardly done by ourselves or left undone due to the lack of staff, as this work was either outside the purview of the library IT personnel on site or too far to attend to for the university IT personnel off site. In addition, the subjectivity of tech users is not natural but produced (Gray 2020). In our case, our lived experiences did not produce us as the imagined default users with the “right” capital to accumulate the necessary digital literacy for these machines.

To be clear, it is not that we didn’t have digital literacy, but the literacy we did have was out of line and time in relation to the default users. Many participants mentioned their introduction to STEM fields via the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program⁸ that they were enrolled in at their nearby school, and their school reported over 73 percent of its students as from low-income households and over 60 percent as minority enrollment. Apart from one participant who had a parent working as a programmer in a tech startup and gained some exposure to digital technologies at home, most of the participants’ families used the library as their primary way to access digital technologies informally outside of school. While I had been regarded as relatively “tech-savvy” by the library staff and participants, I actually had no formal training in any STEM fields, having selected the “humanities track” like most girls in high school back then in Taiwan and moved on to sociology and arts in my work, and only accumulated digital literacy as my various classes and jobs required. As a result, our uses of technologies often fell outside of tech’s normalized imaginings.

From 1997 to 2004 Elizabeth Delacruz (2004) conducted a study to examine public school teachers’ working conditions in terms of technology use, which outlined several challenges of emerging technologies in classrooms. Though her study was conducted over a decade ago and specifically refers to K–12 teachers, the challenges she describes strongly resonated with my own action research. In the following, I read their challenges alongside my own experiences to propose the related but different ways in which technologies didn’t work in specific moments during pedagogical practices as technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles. While I note their respective intricacies, they are by no means mutually exclusive. Instead, the unfolding moments when technologies didn’t work in practice often manifested the ongoing co-constitutive reconfiguration of materialities, subjectivities, and temporalities in our intersecting sociotechnical systems. For the purpose of this paper, they act as broad descriptors outlining the common patterns of momentary encounters with technologies in pedagogical practices.

By technological breakdowns, I mean broadly instances where the “thingness” of technologies (Slack and Wise 2007, 96) that we physically interact and interface with decay, dissolve, and decompose over space and time. In these instances, the materiality of technologies becomes foregrounded as we take note of its out-of-order-ness during interaction. For example, in one instance during the workshop, the projector’s old remote in the room refused to connect with the projector mounted high up on the ceiling even after we tried to resuscitate the remote by changing its batteries, banging it, and blowing on it. We submitted the troubled remote to specialized personnel to investigate after the librarians found another remote for us to use in the meantime. Later on, it was determined simply to be an issue of general wear and tear on its components with age that prevented its functionality. In the context of Delacruz’s (2004) study, one challenge that she outlined was the lack of infrastructural support for teachers as tied to recurring moments of technological breakdowns. Although administrative managers in schools and school boards were deeply invested in the exploration of experimental curriculum with technologies, the lack of infrastructure for the ongoing maintenance of digital machines placed teachers in a position with more than they had bargained for. As a result, “equipment broke down, programs did not work when planned, server networks were down” (Delacruz 2004, 13).

By technological failures, I mean broadly instances where technologies failed to meet our expectations of being who/what we imagine them to be and performing as we assumed they would. At the same time, the “experts” of these technologies might have argued that nothing is functionally wrong with the technologies besides a user error. Namely, we, the users, are the error in this technological configuration as we haven’t been using these technologies “properly.” In these instances, the subjectivity of technologies becomes highlighted as we take note of how they challenge our existing assumptions, comment on us as the thing that’s out of order, and require us to revise our movements in specific ways during interaction. For example, in one instance during the workshop, every participant yelled out, “It’s not working! It won’t save!” (Anonymous participants, spoken to author, March 2, 2016) after following along my step-by-step instruction of how to download and save an image on their respective laptops. Upon replaying the instructions again, we realized that the issue was that I forgot to emphasize, and participants simply didn’t know, the folder name on these university-owned laptops for which we were allowed to save files. Delacruz (2004) outlined the challenge of recurring moments of technological failures when teachers don’t know how to use these technologies, and she emphasized their tie to the lack of adequate training provided to teachers to adopt these mandated technologies. Often, trainings on how to use these newly available technologies were conducted over short in-service professional development workshops that were insufficient in providing adequate practice with technologies.

By technological troubles, I mean broadly instances where the line between technological breakdown and failure collapses to form a larger constellation of entangled mess and introduces conflicting troubles within existing practice that is bounded by time and space (Marvin 1988). In these instances, the competing temporalities of the various technologies we include in our practices become emphasized as we encounter the ambivalence and lack of any certain and comprehensive resolution to direct our actions. For example, in one instance, one of the laptops somehow reset overnight and wouldn’t turn on as I was setting up the room right before the workshop began. The laptop indicated to me that its time was incorrectly set and needed adjustment, but this adjustment required logging into the admin account, for which I did not have access as a person borrowing this laptop from the university. Given that time was ticking towards the moment when the participants got off school and ran into the room for our workshop, I was constrained to choose between abandoning that laptop in carrying out the workshop with two, and possibly more, participants having to share one laptop or spending time trying to reach our university personnel for the admin password that would delay the other necessary set-ups for the workshop.

Similarly, Delacruz (2004) emphasized that the various challenges teachers described bleed and culminate into the main challenge that teachers faced: time, or the lack thereof. In addition to various existing rubrics for evaluation, teachers were expected to possess the technological proficiency for developing curricula that incorporated emerging technologies by learning about these tools on their own time and for resolving any issues related to the computers that they were using during the time of teaching. Whose time is being taken to acquire the literacy in how to use this technology? Whose after-hours are required to assure the smooth running of the machines? What to do with the time during teaching when technologies fail? Like the K–12 teachers mentioned, I, too, experienced a tension with time. This tension and feeling of lack of time is characterized by my aspiration to realize various learning potentials of technological mediations and my internalized expectations around delivering the learning objective: these competing temporalities characterize the tension in moments of technological trouble.

Perhaps these moments, then, can be understood as providing an opening for critical feminist pedagogues to probe the previously unnoticeable logics undergirding these technologies with those present, and in return practice exercising and negotiating our respective relations with these technologies. During moments of technological breakdown, our practices with materiality, of whose resources and what knowledge is being extended, become sites for contested negotiations. During moments of technological failure, our sense of subjectivity, of who is able to act and what is being acted upon, becomes grounds for reparative reconfiguration. During moments of technological trouble, our lived temporality, of whose and what temporal order is being maintained, becomes locations for reflexive interventions. While these moments offer potentials for making, unmaking, and remaking our relationalities, the language we use to name our engagements during those moments frame the kind of relationship we can and cannot have with technologies, which in return constrains what knowledge can and cannot be made by whom.

A metaphor is always figurative; it is “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 5). Throughout the workshop, we used troubleshooting to describe a variety of miscellaneous activities we engaged in with the “thingness” of technologies (Slack and Wise 2007, 96), such as finessing with the batteries, googling for how-tos on our laptops, and pressing the on/off button. Through the triangulation of these layered activities, we tried to solve the problem of technologies “not working” and get them to perform in particular ways. While troubleshooting has historically been used specifically to describe interactions with technical arrangements, products, and systems, troubleshooting has traversed colloquially beyond the technical domain and can be metaphorically applied to describe various kinds of problem-solving (Oxford English Dictionary Online 2019). Perhaps because troubleshooting is commonly understood as originating from the technical domain, it is easy to overlook that troubleshooting is a metaphor even in the technical domain.

As a metaphor, troubleshooting is layered in the following ways: first, troubleshooting is about understanding and experiencing technologies through the frame of electronic, particularly telegraphy and telephony, technicians. In a genealogy of troubleshooting, Shari Wolk (2017) traces the term to the “trouble men” of early telephony industry in the United States during the turn of the twentieth century. As the telephony industry grew, the term trouble men was used to describe the service workers of the telephony companies that were on stand-by “prepared to attend at once to sudden calls for assistance” from telephone subscribers (Oxford English Dictionary Online 2021b); a vocation emerged for electronic technicians whose responsibility was to diagnose, repair, and maintain the infrastructure of telephone technology. As service technicians, we should also consider trouble men as part of the larger field of electricians that became professionalized during the turn of the twentieth century. As Carolyn Marvin argues, the idea of electricians as a particular type of elite expert was invented through the establishment of electrical textual communities that foregrounded their “technological literacy” (1988, 12) during that period. Their work of interpreting technical arrangements to institute actions are often described as troubleshooting, or sometimes referred to as trouble-hunting, which leads us to the second layer of troubleshooting as a metaphor.

Second, troubleshooting is about approaching and engaging with troubles through the frame of discharging a weapon. As the Oxford English Dictionary Online defines it, shooting refers to the literal “action or practice of discharging missiles from a bow or gun” (2021a). In discharging a weapon, the goal is to precisely and swiftly eliminate, or at least affect or impact, a target. As Amanda Phillips argues about shooting, “one of the difficulties in assessing police violence is that it often happens in an instant” (2018, 145, emphasis added). With the aid of a systemized object calibrated for efficiency as weapon, shooting implies quick judgment and action—namely, “twitch reflexes” (139)—about anomalies for the purpose of returning to an exterior order. But, how to shoot with such precision? In the contexts of Julian Orr’s ethnography on Xerox Corporation service technicians during the 1980s and 1990s as contemporary trouble men, procedural textual documentation stands in as the weapon used by the technician to ensure “the situation is under control” (1996, 108) and institute order. The premise of this documentation is that “a careful following of the prescriptions from beginning to end will lead to the resolution of problems more quickly than could be accomplished by the technicians reasoning from their understanding of the machine” (106, emphasis added). In this sense, to troubleshoot also implies the ability to read and command various technical documentations efficiently and accurately, which leads us to the last layer of this metaphor.

Third, troubleshooting is about comprehending and enacting problem-solving through the frame of procedural technical documentations. As Sarah Sharma argues, a temporal order is maintained via individuals and social groups orienting, recalibrating, and “synchronizing their body clocks, their sense for the future or the present, to an exterior relation” (2014, 18), which could be that of a person, ideology, institution, and/or technology. In the case of early electrical textual communities, “electrical engineers and researchers fully intended that these literate skills and the theoretical knowledge they embodied replace the skills of the tinkerer and craft mechanic, skills governed by an authority of the body that arrives at truth from the direct experiences of the senses” (Marvin 1988, 12). The legacy of this emphasis on textuality manifests today as consumer technology purchase is ubiquitously accompanied by a user manual, detailing the correct way to use it, with a troubleshooting guide section, detailing steps to take towards specific problems. Specifically, taking the following troubleshooting guide of a projector as referent (Figure 1), troubleshooting is a metaphor insofar as this piece of instruction is a stand-in for the act of problem-solving. Yet this order as detailed is based on a universal image of what normal functioning/functional relationships between technologies and people look like in some other time and place—namely, a time and place centered on the experiences and resources of experts that command particular technological literacies to devise such an arrangement of order. In this sense, troubleshooting is understood as the enactment of a series of actions aimed at resolving an issue as detailed on textual documentations, whereby the solution is predetermined without situated assessments of the materials at hand.

By naming our pedagogical encounters during moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles as troubleshooting, we are mobilizing service technicians’ relation to their work, a weapon’s relation to its target, and a procedural technical documentation’s relation to knowledge to describe and position our relationship with technologies. In its most reductive sense, it’s as if to troubleshoot is to role-play as a service technician that executes their work swiftly by following and enacting a series of procedural steps defined by available texts elsewhere. To shoot trouble is to standardize our situated contexts to universal terms, to engage in a relationship premised on the framework of control, and to invest in the temporal order of technological development as predetermined knowledge. Shifting to the metaphor of caregiving towards troublecaring allows us to speculate other ways we might relate to technological trouble.

Troubleshooting assumes a normative state of functioning technologies that requires us to standardize our situated contexts to universal terms. Troubleshooting prefigures us to prioritize the necessary infrastructures that technologies depend upon to function over the messy unique intricacies of local needs, which reproduces existing hierarchies of resource distribution and technological literacy as unmalleable material conditions. To troubleshoot technological breakdowns in our case meant that participants and I forwent our previous intentions, ad-hoc stepped into the role of technicians by becoming familiar with the prerequisite technological literacy and subscribed to the authoritative mandates of technical documentations as our source of access to these literacies. And yet, what became clear was that our troubles were unending despite all these efforts to troubleshoot, like whack-a-mole. Because our place will never be like that place, our local infrastructure does not match the terms these technologies depend upon to animate and function. Instead of resolving anything, to troubleshoot meant to subscribe to the belief that there is a supposed normative state of functioning technologies and that our material realities needed to catch up to the model classroom to sustain such a functional relationship with technologies. In effect, the knowledge that can be produced under this unreciprocated relationship during pedagogical encounters was always oriented towards serving an authority elsewhere at some other place.

If our practices with materiality become sites for contested negotiations during moments of technological breakdown, what ways does the metaphor of troublecaring offer us to relate to the trouble of unending material decays? Perhaps the shift lies in the relentless centering of bodies present to probe what is the trouble needing care and how to meet those needs at this moment. Given, technologies depend “on people willing to adapt their tools to a specific situation while adapting the situation to the tools, on and on, endlessly tinkering” (Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010, 15). If the trouble is that there are broken technologies that need maintenance and repair, we might try to caregive by playing the whack-a-mole game ourselves. But the ongoing reoccurrences of this need leads us to (re)assess “how adequately care is provided” (Tronto 1993, 108). We have to ask, What is actually the trouble here and how can we meet its needs? Is the object of our care responding to the care received? If not, is it that we misrecognized the trouble and its needs? If yes, how might we take the ongoingness of this work into account to figure out how to organize and provide adequate care over time? Who else besides us gives care to these technologies? How do we involve more caregivers? Why were we caregiving in the first place, and do we want or have the capacity to continue? What other troubles might be needing our care if we continue? These questions might lead us to consider the larger systemic conditions structuring why we find ourselves here in the first place and try out ways to restructure our conditions. Or maybe it leads us to question what we actually want and need in relation to the software we were trying to access initially and figuring out how to work with materials that are readily available to us right here and now. By returning again and again to center the question of what is the trouble needing care and how to meet those needs, troublecaring asks us to not give up on trouble but to care about which trouble we caregive, especially when our caring relations are not reciprocal.

Troubleshooting prescribes one as the shooter and another as that to be shot, which projects a subject reality premised on the framework of control through technological literacy. In our case, we encountered moments of technological failures because we were often out of control. In the instance mentioned earlier about how to save a file on the laptop, participants were not aware of the layered interests inscribed onto the configuration of a laptop as a private property of a public institution. In this instance, to troubleshoot was to shoot down the claims of “it’s not working!” by the participants to institute order for and literacy about private property; it’s as if to say, “No, the laptop is working fine. It’s you that’s not working. You need to be corrected.” In another instance, we could not connect and play Minecraft together through the library’s local area network (LAN). Upon digging around in both the game’s menu and online discussion forums, we realized that it may be an issue with the library’s network configurations. Namely, in the interests of protecting the patrons’ as well as the library’s information from being breached through the library’s widely accessed network, the network security prevented nodes on the network from accessing each other directly. Given that we’d spent plenty of time on this matter and come to what seemed like a dead end, some of us gave up. However, one participant proceeded and succeeded; they learned that they could use my smartphone’s hotspot for us to bypass that restriction, and we were able to play through the phone’s patchy network. To read that exchange through the lens of troubleshooting is to understand the participant’s insistence on being in control that led to an advancement of technological literacy. In these instances, to troubleshoot meant to relate to the disorder at hand with binary oppositions competing for the position of control. In effect, the knowledge that can be produced under this one-upmanship during pedagogical encounters was always about how to control.

If our sense of subjectivity becomes grounds for reparative reconfiguration during moments of technological failure, what ways do the metaphor of troublecaring offer us to relate to the trouble of being technologically illiterate? Perhaps the shift lies in prioritizing the collective liveliness of our caring relation over individual interests and technologies. With care being neither cure nor control, care is not aimed at eliminating the trouble by catching up, but perhaps to attend to the logics of this literacy that positioned us in this encounter. In this sense, lesson plans and learning objectives determined prior to the pedagogical encounter continue to matter insofar as they open the possibility of us encountering this trouble. In practicing Black feminist pedagogy, Barbara Omolade says, “No one can teach students to ‘see,’ but an instructor is responsible for providing the windows, out of which possible angles of vision emerge from a coherent ordering of information and content” (1987, 39). Once the trouble is encountered, how do we support students to develop their own troublecaring practices without letting our attachments to the original goals erase the possibility for their emergent knowledges? With care not free from the dangers of “paternalism/maternalism” and “parochialism” (Tronto 1993, 171), we must center the “balance between care-givers and care-receivers” (171). In the cases above, maybe the care participants needed from me wasn’t to tell them the how-tos or carry on with plan B. Maybe the care they needed was me letting go of my attachment to our original lesson route and pause to ask them, Why might it be that these folders are restricted? How does this differ from the library computers you’re used to? Can you share with us what you learned about the library’s network in this process? Why do you think it’s set up that way? Who benefits from this set-up? How do we still receive what we need under this set-up? In centering the present to pose these questions, maybe we wouldn’t reach where we wanted to go but we’d find other places to be. Or maybe we could have still reached the learning objective together, albeit through routes that we didn’t know existed before.

Troubleshooting implies trouble as an exception to the norm that requires swift action for elimination to recalibrate us towards the temporal order of technological developments. In our case, we encountered moments of technological troubles because we had neither the infrastructural resources to support the perfect functioning of technologies nor the technological literacy to be the troubleshooter. Under this context, trouble is not an exception but the norm. And yet, we tried. We tried to approach the trouble as the exception and role-played as troubleshooters. We traded in time that would have allowed us to produce our own knowledge about how to decipher that weird noise from the laptop making trouble for a split-second judgment that the fan was not the culprit here. To troubleshoot, then, was to invest in the temporal order of technological development as predetermined knowledge by trading in the time it takes to develop emergent expertise through embodied experience. We traded this time because we found ourselves in this situation and grabbed on to anything that could act as a compass. Most importantly, we traded because we were curious and liked to play, particularly games. When the intersecting technologies that structured our lives construe the bulk of our lived experiential time as out of sync, what other option is there besides trying to calibrate through troubleshooting? I suppose a different way of relating may be a start.

If our lived temporality becomes locations for reflexive interventions during moments of technological trouble, what ways do the metaphor of troublecaring offer us to relate the trouble of conflicting temporalities? If caregiving is the ongoing tinkering in situations to meet emergent needs of the present, troublecaring positions us to relate to tech trouble as something to keep our focused attention over time as we labor to peel back its entangled needs. If caregiving necessitates us to prioritize the ever-shifting relationship between the caregiver and care-receiver, troublecaring also calls us to practice with what’s readily available in/with/through/around our embodied selves at this moment in time, such as our lived experiences that may be troubling us to take note of other troubles. This practice connects to the pedagogical framework Judy Rohrer calls “‘It’s in the Room’”: “recognizing that whatever the social justice topic is that we are studying (gender oppression, ableism, racism, colonialism, heterosexism, classism, etc.), it is almost always in the room in some form or another” (2018, 577). When we are troubled by the conflicting temporalities we find ourselves in during pedagogical encounters, perhaps it is precisely when we need to take the time to understand and attend to these troubles’ presences. How did we find ourselves here? How do our practices layered with technologies make time for one by erasing time for another, and why? How do our lesson plans as technologies scaffold time? What experiences do we base these plans on? What do we want to make time for in practice now? Most importantly, how can we do it otherwise next time?

In the preceding pages, I reflect on a pedagogical action research project with youths around digital technologies in a public library setting that I partook in back in 2016. By analyzing these experiences, I articulate that the rather mundane and repetitive moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles offer potentials for making, unmaking, and remaking our relationalities with technologies, knowledge, and each other. In reflecting on how we responded to these offerings, I center my analysis on the metaphor of troubleshooting that we commonly used to describe our actions during those moments. In tracing this metaphor, I argue that to shoot trouble is to standardize our situated contexts to universal terms, to engage in a relationship premised on the framework of control, and to invest in the temporal order of technological development as predetermined knowledge. In turn, I foreground a desire and need to reach for a different metaphor to respond to the offers of inquiry made by these moments.

What other ways are there to relate to trouble? I speculate on what the metaphor of troublecaring might provide for pedagogues in reflecting on how to relate to trouble, and by extension each other, technologies, and knowledge, for pedagogical practice. I turn to care as someone who cares deeply about her pedagogical practices but found herself in “moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable” (Atkinson-Graham et al. 2015, 739). I’m still uncertain. But if “staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present” (Haraway 2016, 1), then maybe troublecaring, instead of troubleshooting, means that we take the time to understand the trouble and its needs before acting on it, at the very least.

¹ By “loosely structured after-school program,” I mean that these after-school programs are not dependent upon prior sign-up, nor do they require participants to stay the whole time. Participants can drop in and out of these programs anytime. Furthermore, the programs are not based on any larger curricular mandates by the library, but instead composed on an ad-hoc basis when a shared topic of focus, an available space and related technologies, a group of interested participants, and an available instructor coincide.

² As the library sat directly across from a public middle school with around seven hundred students, many middle school students would visit and hang out at the library after school. In comparison to the other privatized commercial establishments nearby, the library was particularly popular among students as visits were not predicated upon purchasing any item. In the library there is a separate Teen Space staffed with Teen Librarians to support the needs and interests of the youth patrons, and the space was equipped with desktops specifically to be used by them.

³ “Library patrons” were the way that the librarians I worked with referred to the youth visitors to the library.

⁴ According to a news report published after my collaboration with the library ended, the number of youth visitors to the library has doubled to more than two hundred people daily. The library is in the process of securing funds from public and private entities to finance the redesign of a previous storage space to be used as the new teen center with an abundance of new technologies.

⁵ These laptops were purchased via the public engagement grant as university property and subject to the university’s technology policies. Whenever possible, I also bring along additional laptops, either loaned from the university’s general-use media check-out window and/or personal laptops I had access to.

⁷ The number of participants fluctuated across the weeks as participants dropped in and out of the workshops. About seven participants consistently showed up across the weeks.

⁸ The AVID program started in San Diego high schools in the 1980s as a program to “motivate and prepare underachieving students from underrepresented linguistic- and ethnic-minority groups to perform well in high school and to seek a college education” (Mehan, Hubbard, and Villanueva 1994, 98).

Acuff, Joni Boyd. 2014. “(Re)constructing Cultural Conceptions and Practices in Art Education: An Action Research Study.” Visual Arts Research 40 (2): 67–78. https://doi.org/10.5406/visuartsrese.40.2.0067.

Agosto, Denise E., Rachel M. Magee, Michael Dickard, and Andrea Forte. 2016. “Teens, Technology, and Libraries: An Uncertain Relationship.” Library Quarterly 86 (3): 248–69. https://doi.org/10.1086/686673.

Atkinson-Graham, Melissa, Martha Kenney, Kelly Ladd, Cameron, Michael Murray, and Emily Astra-Jean Simmonds. 2015. “Care in Context: Becoming an STS Researcher.” Social Studies of Science 45 (5): 738–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715600277.

Chan, Anita Say. 2013. Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chen, Chi Yusn. 2015. “A Study Showing Research Has Been Valued over Teaching in Higher Education.” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 15 (3): 15–32. https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v15i3.13319.

Congdon, Kristin G. 1997. “CAUTION! Technology in the Classroom May Be Harmful.” In New Technologies in Art Education, edited by Diane C. Gregory, 107–14. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Cong-Huyen, Anne, Genevieve Carpio, Sarmista (Sharm) Das, George Hoagland, Michael Mirer, Veronica Paredes, Amanda Phillips, and Christofer Rodelo. 2017. FemTechNet Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy Workbook. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/ftn-ethnic-studies-pedagogy-workbook-/index.

Delacruz, Elizabeth. 2004. “Teachers' Working Conditions and the Unmet Promise of Technology.” Studies in Art Education 46 (1): 6–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2004.11650065.

———. 2009. “Art Education Aims in the Age of New Media: Moving Toward Global Civil Society.” Art Education 62 (5): 13–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2009.11519032.

Flanagan, Mary. 2009 Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Garoian, Charles R., and Yvonne M. Gaudelius. 2001. “Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing Resistance in the Digital Age.” Studies in Art Education 42 (4): 333–47. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1321078.

Gray, Kishonna L. 2020. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press.

Gregory, Diane. 1997. “Art Education Reform: Technology as Savior.” In New Technologies in Art Education, edited by Diane C. Gregory, 163–68. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Jackson, Steven J. 2014. "11 Rethinking Repair." In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A Foot, 221–39. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Keifer-Boyd, Karen T. 2017. “FemTechNet Distributed Open Collaborative Course: Performing Difference, Exquisite Engendering, and Feminist Mapping.” In Convergence of Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Global Civic Engagement, edited by Ryan Shin, 278–96. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Kishimoto, Kyoko, and Mumbi Mwangi. 2009. “Critiquing the Rhetoric of ‘Safety’ in Feminist Pedagogy: Women of Color Offering an Account of Ourselves.” Feminist Teacher 19 (2): 87–102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40546084.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lin, Ching-Chiu, and Bertram C. Bruce. 2013. “Engaging Youth in Underserved Communities through Digital-Mediated Arts Learning Experiences for Community Inquiry.” Studies in Art Education 54 (4): 335–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2013.11518907.

Lucero, Jorge. 2016. “Conceptualist as Educator / Educator as Conceptualist.” In Artist-Teachers in Context: International Dialogues, edited by Raphael Vella, 187–96. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

May, Wanda T. 1993. “‘Teachers-as-Researchers’ or Action Research: What Is It, and What Good Is It for Art Education?" Studies in Art Education 34 (2): 114–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1320448.

Mehan, Hugh, Lea Hubbard, and Irene Villanueva. 1994. “Forming Academic Identities: Accommodation without Assimilation among Involuntary Minorities.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 25 (2): 91–117. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3195941.

Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols. 2010. “Care: Putting Practice into Theory.” In Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, edited by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols, 7–25. London: Transcript.

Morbey, Mary Leigh. 1997. “Women, Discriminating Computer Technology, and Arts Education.” In New Technologies in Art Education, edited by Diane C. Gregory, 155–62. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Omolade, Barbara. 1987. “A Black Feminist Pedagogy.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 15 (3–4): 32–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40003434.

Orr, Julian E. 1996. Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Osberg, Deborah, and Gert Biesta. 2008. “The Emergent Curriculum: Navigating a Complex Course between Unguided Learning and Planned Enculturation." Journal of Curriculum Studies 40 (3): 313–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220270701610746.

Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2019. “Trouble-shooter, n.” Last modified December 2019.

Phillips, Amanda. 2018. "Shooting to Kill: Headshots, Twitch Reflexes, and the Mechropolitics of Video Games." Games and Culture 13 (2): 136–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015612611.

———. 2020. Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture. New York: NYU Press.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rhoades, Mindi, Melanie G. Davenport, Courtnie N. Wolfgang, Kim Cosier, and James H. Sanders III. 2013. “Big Gay Church: Sermons to and for an Underserved Population in Art Education Settings.” Studies in Art Education 54 (4): 349–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2013.11518908.

Rohrer, Judy. 2018. “‘It's in the Room’: Reinvigorating Feminist Pedagogy, Contesting Neoliberalism, and Trumping Post-truth Populism.” Teaching in Higher Education 23 (5): 576–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1455656.

Sharma, Sarah. 2014. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 2020. “A Manifesto for the Broken Machine.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 35 (2 (104)): 171–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-8359652.

Situated Critical Race and Media (SCRAM). n.d. “Introduction.” Accessed March 2, 2022. https://www.mediamaplab.com/.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and John Macgregor Wise. 2007. Culture and Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang.

Suchman, Lucy A. 1987. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Pamela G. 2004. “Hyperaesthetics: Making Sense of Our Technomediated World.” Studies in Art Education 45 (4): 328–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1321068.

Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.

ViewSonic. 2011.‪ PJD7383/ PJD7383i/PJD7583w/PJD7583wi DLP Projector User Guide. ViewSonic Corporation.

Wolk, Shari. 2017. “The Troubles of Trouble Men.” Paper presented at the Maintainers II 2017 Conference, Stevens Institute of Technology, April 6–9, 2017. https://themaintainers.org/maintainers-ii-program.

Hong-An Wu is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Studies in the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas