Alev’s research looks at the working conditions in makerspaces and other places of hardware innovation in Kenya. Hereby, she is particularly interested in the interplay between international investment, the ubiquitous belief in progress through technological innovation and the actual everyday work in Nairobi. Her work examines what affective and socio-material practices are particularly demanded from places, bodies, and machines that are marked as technologically ‘catching-up’ and therefore as peripheral to global technology development. Alev argues that making technologies in Kenya entails collaborative and loving work between co-workers, machines, and material, but also strenuous efforts of positioning within workplace hierarchies, technocapitalism, and colonial legacies.