It’s been a busy and exciting stretch at the EITM Lab. Our work has been growing in two directions at once, spanning both our makerspace equity research and our newer work on AI and emerging technologies. We wanted to share a snapshot of what the team has been up to and what’s coming next.

Making Makerspaces for Everyone

Much of our energy this summer has gone into the Inclusive Makerspace Toolkit, a free, openly accessible set of resources for educators, makerspace staff, and information professionals who want to design spaces where more students feel they belong. Grounded in Dr. Marijel Melo’s NSF CAREER research, the Toolkit is built as a series of facilitator guides that move from reading the signals a space sends, to first impressions at the threshold, to the design choices that quietly shape who feels welcome, and finally to what keeps people coming back over time. We’re putting the finishing touches on the full series ahead of its formal launch later this summer.

This work is also heading out into the world. Our makerspace findings will be featured in upcoming presentations at MiRA and ACTAL, where we’re looking forward to sharing what we’ve learned with wider communities of educators and researchers.

Expanding Into AI and Emerging Technologies

Alongside the makerspace work, the lab has been developing a growing strand of research on artificial intelligence and its social impacts. Two recent efforts mark this expansion.

The first is a position paper accepted to a workshop at ACM DIS, titled “Care and Collectivity: Global South Philosophies and Technowomanism as a Vision for Equitable AI Design.” It asks what equitable AI might look like if it drew on relational wisdom traditions from the Global South, such as Ubuntu, buen vivir, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, and kapwa, and imagines AI designed for community flourishing rather than individual optimization.

The second is a paper we recently submitted to the inaugural ACM AI Summit, titled “Beyond the Policy Trap: Building People-Centered AI Governance.” Drawing on interviews with administrators across the UNC System, it argues that universities should move beyond static policy toward more adaptive governance infrastructure, one built on AI literacy, equitable access, and participatory decision-making. Both papers reflect the lab’s commitment to studying emerging technologies through the lens of equity, participation, and care.

Sharing Our Work More Widely

We’re also proud that Dr. Melo recently presented a poster at the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) conference in Irvine, California, on ?

Looking Ahead

Across both research areas, a shared thread runs through everything we do, which is the belief that the environments and tools we build reflect the communities we choose to value. As the Toolkit launches and our AI work continues to take shape, we can’t wait to share more. Stay tuned.