CDSC Spring Symposium 2018

Multiplayer: Critical Perspectives on Video Games and Online Environments

Games and online environments allow for infinite possibilities to create new personas and new societies that are radically different than real life.  But this freedom doesn’t mean that online everyone is equal and social inequities are not replicated.  Acknowledging that virtual worlds replicate the social values of their creators is a small part of the 2017-2018 WSU Common Reading book, “Ready Player One,” when one character reveals that offline they are definitely nothing like their avatar and they did this to embody a more privileged space in the Oasis, the virtual world at the core of the story.  The same goal – to complicate games and online environments – is something that guests for this symposium are all interested in doing in their scholarship and praxis.  The presenters will critique, interrupt, and challenge game play so our digital future is does not simply replicate and reinforce the inequity of our analog past.

Sponsors:

Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, WSU Libraries, Native Programs, English Department, History Department, Asia Program, Sociology Department, and Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies Department.

See the schedule for the Open Gameplay & Keynote with Matt Swanson on March 7th

March 8th: Symposium and Workshops 

• Thursday, March 8th, 9:00am-5:30pm
• Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, 4th floor Holland Library
• The morning talks will be livestreamed

Symposium (Facebook Event)

9:00-10:00am

Dr. Megan Condis, Assistant Professor of English, Stephen F. Austin State University
Speaking Topic: Gender, Gaming, and Online Culture

Dr. Condis completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her forthcoming book, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, examines the way video game fans compose their identities online.  She is a regular contributor to Unwinnable.  She also serves as a member of the Editorial Board for Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (University of Nebraska Press) and the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds (Intellect Books).  She writes about gender and popular culture on her blog at https://megancondis.wordpress.com/ and on Twitter @MeganCondis.

10:00-11:00am

Dr. Edmond Y. Chang, Assistant Professor of English, Ohio University
Speaking Topic: Technonormativity

Dr. Chang’s areas of interest include technoculture, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, video games, popular culture, and contemporary American literature. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and his dissertation is entitled “Technoqueer: Re/con/figuring Posthuman Narratives.”  This past fall, he taught a class at called “Ready Player Two: Critical Approaches to Virtual Worlds and Video Games.”  Recent publications include “Queergaming” in Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press) and “A Game Chooses, A Player Obeys: BioShock, Posthumanism, and the Limits of Queerness” in Gaming Representation (Indiana University Press).  He is currently working on his first book tentatively called Queerness Cannot Be Designed: Digital Games and the Trouble with Technonormativity.

11:00am-12:00pm

Dr. Kishonna L. Gray, Assistant Professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College, Arizona State University  
Speaking Topic: Intersectionality in Online Environments

Dr. Gray is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.  She previously served as a MLK Scholar and Visiting Professor in Women & Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.  Her work broadly intersects identity and new media although she has a particular focus on gaming.  She is the author of Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014) which as been described by T.L. Taylor “an insightful, original, and compelling piece of research.” Her current monograph is tentatively titled “On Being Black And…The Journey to Intersectionality in Digital Gaming Culture” and is currently under contract with LSU Press.  Her work has been featured in both academic and public outlets.  She’s is also a featured blogger and podcaster with “Not Your Mama’s Gamer.”  Follow her on Twitter @KishonnaGray.

Workshops (Facebook event)

1:30pm – 3:30pm

Matt Swanson – An Overview of the Game Creation Process

Edmond Chang – #WeNeedDiverseGames: Close Playing Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Games

3:30pm – 5:30pm

Megan Condis – Introduction to Creating Interactive Games with Twine

Kishonna Gray – Designing Games for Empathy

The story of the digital humanities is often narrated as a decades-long history of the computational manipulation of print. What alternative histories are concealed by such a story? How might we imagine DH differently if we move beyond a focus on text toward multimodal expression and design? What audiences might such work reach? This talk will trace some of the alternate histories of DH, paying particular attention to the visual and the political by engaging the work of feminists, artists, and scholars of color. This talk will also consider how scholarly evidence might be engaged anew through the aesthetic possibilities of the digital archive. By taking up the work of the Vectors Lab, Tara will approach these questions through concrete examples of digital scholarship today.

Join us for Tara’s talk at the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, 4th floor Holland Library, Thursday, March 3rd, 3:30-5:00pm

“Canonical histories of digital humanities, and digital history in particular, almost completely fail to notice the work of women in the field. Given this lapse, an aspiring digital historian might reasonably conclude that women scholars and practitioners historically have offered no significant contributions to the work. Fortunately, and obviously, that impression is wrong. In fact, women have played essential roles in shaping the field of digital history—taking on important roles in key projects and developments, even the ones that are most frequently attributed to men. A number of significant factors, primarily related to labor conditions, have combined to perpetuate a “great man theory” history of digital history. This talk takes these circumstances into account and offers a revised origin story for digital history that recognizes the women who have helped shape the field.”

Join us for Sharon’s talk at the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, 4th floor Holland Library, Tuesday, February 28th, 3:30-5:00pm

Veronica Paredes is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois. Her research and teaching interests include reconfigured media spaces, feminist and critical pedagogies, networked collective praxis, and digital media historiography and forms of scholarship. She is an active member of FemTechNet (Feminist Technology Network) and serves on its Steering Committee, as well as its Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Committee and Tech Praxis working group. She received her Ph.D. from the Media Arts + Practice program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is currently working on a book project about cinema’s recycled spaces in contemporary mediascapes.

Join us for Veronica’s talk at the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, 4th floor Holland Library, Thursday, February 2nd, 3:00-4:30pm

The cost of college textbooks has risen 1,041% since 1977, according to a recent NBC study of federal data. That substantial figure confirms what most college students already know—course supply costs are a burden. The Open Education Resource movement offers one solution to the growing costs of educational resources by making it possible to license materials for free use. Open access textbooks play an important role in the movement toward sharing knowledge because they can replace expensive textbooks published for profit. Open access textbooks also have the benefit of promoting emergent subjects of study without worrying about course adoption rates.

These presentations will participate in the Open Education movement by featuring prototype textbooks on social media. Because no standard textbooks exist on the subject of social media, this project by Digital Technology & Culture (DTC) students lays the groundwork for further development in education focused on digital literacy, Internet privacy, e-security, creativity, and effective communication.

Students will model an online textbook using the free, open-source publishing platform Scalar and present their work on October 24th in two rounds, at 9am and 10am. Join us for one or both presentations to celebrate the start of Open Access Week.

Join us for a film screening of The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.

When: 7-9 pm, October 25, 2016

Where: CUB 210

What: This film recounts the story of Aaron Swartz, a programming prodigy and information activist who helped develop Reddit, RSS, and Creative Commons. Swartz believed in a free and open Internet, which led to his advocacy against SOPA/PIPA and for open access. His life—which was tragically cut short—raises important questions about the relationship between technology, information access, and our civil liberties.

This event is sponsored by GPSA and the WSU Libraries. Please join us for other events in celebration of Open Access Week, 2016. Find out more at http://libguides.libraries.wsu.edu/openaccessweek

Symposium Schedule

Morning Session

9:30am: Coffee

9:45am: Opening remarks & welcome

10:00am: Teresa Zackodnik, “Intense Continuities”: Media Technologies of Black Protest

11:15am: Bergis Jules, The Ethics of Documenting Social Movements

Lunch Break 12:30pm to 1:30pm

Afternoon Session

1:45pm: TreaAndrea Russworm, Race, Technology, and the Problem of Recognition

3:00pm: Roundtable featuring speakers with Thabiti Lewis

4:15pm: Closing remarks & acknowledgements

Since the summer of 2013, #BlackLivesMatter has linked myriad, loosely affiliated protests against pervasive anti-Black violence in the United States. Shortly after George Zimmerman’s acquittal, Alicia Garza originated the phrase on Facebook with her affirmation, “Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.” The hashtag has since served as a banner uniting condemnations of violence against Black people. According to the movement’s website, #BlackLivesMatter makes a unique contribution to the history of Black activism because it affirms “the lives of Black queer folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.” This symposium brings together media scholars from various disciplines to discuss what that unprecedented affirmation means for digital publics. Talks will address the history and future of technologically mediated public protest against injustice.

Featured Speakers: Bergis Jules (UC Riverside), TreaAndrea Russworm (UMass Amherst), and Teresa Zackodnik (U Alberta)

Join us at the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, 4th floor Holland Library

Friday, October 7th, 10:00am-4:30-pm

The presentations will also be livestreamed on the CDSC Youtube account (links below)

Teresa Zackodnik: https://youtu.be/VP64zMNrQWM

Bergis Jules: https://youtu.be/MlZ0pGrpb_M

TreaAndrea Russworm: https://youtu.be/81ykUjuO_uQ

Roundtable: https://youtu.be/TT6PNqV54WU

Nicole Tonkovich is professor of literature at University of California, San Diego. She studies the cultural work of women in the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on nonfiction and photography. She has recently published The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance.

Washington State University Press has just released Dividing the Reservation, a companion volume that focuses on Alice C. Fletcher’s correspondence during the allotment years on the Nez Perce Reservation.

Join us for a talk and book signing at the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, 4th floor Holland Library

Thursday, September 22nd, 4:00-5:00pm

Literary studies of letter writing tend to focus on the personal letter. If their focus is fictional, they consider how the letter allows correspondents to build and maintain interpersonal relations; if nonfictional they use letters as means of biographical interpretation, usually of a figure of public renown.

However, when one studies the whole of the correspondence of a single person for a circumscribed period of time, the boundaries between personal and public, as well as fiction and nonfiction diminish. Reading the personal and public (that is, official epistolary reports) Alice C. Fletcher wrote while allotting land on the Nez Perce Reservation in the 1890s bears out this claim.

The myriad letters Fletcher wrote during this period became the means by which the US consolidated an empire of agriculture and trade in the Northwest. Not only her official reports, but also her unofficial letters were crucial components of the “bloodless tasks of empire.” In Fletcher’s case, as in much of the federal negotiations about Indian policy in her time, personal connections of friendship, school and professional ties, religious affiliation, professional/scientific investigations, and what passed for the straightforward application of policy intermingled. To reading her letters in this way challenges assumptions still distressingly prevalent in contemporary scholarship, that “the sentimental” and “the merely personal” were inefficacious means of driving USAmerican expansion at the end of the nineteenth century.

The CDSC thanks The WSU Department of English, the Sherman and Mabel Smith Pettyjohn Memorial Fund from the WSU Department of History, The WSU Libraries, The Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, and the WSU Plateau Center for sponsoring this event.