BCNM Around the Web January 2020
Check out the work of our faculty and alumnni around the web!
Ken Goldberg
Ken Goldberg will speak at the Food Processing Expo, California’s largest food processing trade show and premier event for all facets of the state’s food production industry.Ken will be the keynote speaker at a Food Processing Technology Breakfast on February 13. Read more here!
Rita Lucarelli
Rita Lucarelli was quoted as an expert in a slew of articles about the unearthing of a 4,000 year old guide to the Egyptian underworld! From the New York Times, the Smithsonian Magazine, the Media HQ, and Fox News:
“The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with life in all its forms,” Rita Lucarelli, an Egyptology curator at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “Death for them was a new life.”
Alenda Chang
Alenda's new book Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games was named by Ms Magazine as one of December 2019's top reds!
Saving the environment is a feminist issue–and some feminists play video games! In this intriguing volume, UC-Santa Barbara assistant professor of film and media studies Alenda Chang uniquely connects the two by examining the role video games can, and should, play in addressing our planet’s growing environmental crisis.
Read more here!
Alenda also presented at the Modern Language Association's conferencein Seattle on Interdisciplinarity in/and the Environmental Humanities. From the description:
Panelists interrogate the “nature” of interdisciplinary research, teaching, or collaboration in the environmental humanities. What defines interdisciplinarity? What are its benefits, challenges, best practices, and histories?
Read more here!
Jane McGonigal
American Genius has been reading up on the work of Jane McGonigal for their article on how video games have helped certain companies succeed.
Of course, just because gaming has become mainstream, that doesn’t explain Superhuman’s strategy. Luckily, game designer and scholar Jane McGonigal can give us some insight. In her famous 2010 TED talk, McGonigal argued that in games, people are “more likely to stick with a problem as long as it takes, to get up after failure and try again.” Through a combination of collaboration, carefully set goals and a lack of finality with ‘fails,’ video games are able to encourage individuals to push through difficult scenarios.
Read more here.
Jane is also quoted in Marketing Land in an article on whether gamification has a place in industry.
As Jane McGonigal points out in her book, games draw us into their world, challenge us to be creative and adapt to rapidly changing situations, and reward us with a sense of accomplishment, personal mastery and autonomy.
Read more here.
Reginold Royston
Reginold Royston presented at the African Studies Assocation annual meeting on Being, Belonging and Becoming in Africa in the roundtable on "What does Research on Health, Science, Technology, and Medicine Offer to African Studies?"
Read more here!
Jen Schradie
Jen Schradie gave a talk on whether the web has given more power to the many or the few for Renaissance Numérique and Spintank. From the description:
This contradictory analysis begs the question: what if instead of repairing our democracies and balancing power, social networks played the opposite role?
Read more here.