News/Research

BCNM Around the Web October

24 Oct, 2022

BCNM Around the Web October

Check out the great work of our faculty and alumni around the web this October!

Abigail De Kosnik

Abigail will be speaking on "Distributed Performance" at UC Berkeley this December for the Center on Digital Culture and Society Colloqium.

In this talk, Abigail De Kosnik will discuss her next monograph, provisionally titled Minority Piracy. It will examine why and how queer users, users of color, and poor and disabled users practice media piracy, that is, peer-to-peer file sharing of digital information ranging from academic textbooks to movies and television episodes. She will argue that, through practicing piracy, minority users achieve a kind of ethical consensus, for example practicing piracy as a critique and counterweight to capitalism, not through explicit forms of communication, but through what she calls distributed performance.

Learn more about the event here!

Emma Fraser

Emma featured on the panel for Environments in Historical Games in September. The event was hosted by the Historical Games Network and brought together leading academic and industry thinkers to discuss environments and interactive exploration in historical games.

For this theme, we invited contributors to think about the role of the environment in, of and around historical games, and the role it plays in our explorations and understandings of the intersection between history, play and games. How do games define, depict, and negotiate the “environments” they engage with, and what role does this play when we make meaning about the past? How might games help us to understand past environments? How are games deployed and positioned within present-day spaces to develop ideas and understandings about history and heritage? How do games mobilise the spaces of the future to help us think about the past?

Learn more about the event here!

Hannah Zeavin

Hannah will be hosted by 57th Street Books to discuss her book, "The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy" in November. "The Distance Cure" describes the history of teletherapy and its metamorphosis as a therapeutic treatment.

Learn more about the event here!

Alenda Chang

Alenda spoke at Uncertainty: Ecological and Epistemological Challenges on Screen to discuss the precarity of play.

Games—whether we’re playing them on digital devices or grassy pitches—demand infrastructural support. As such, they can be surprising bellwethers of climate disruption, where the materiality and indeterminacy central to play itself must come to terms with the growing precarity of environmental conditions.

Learn more about the event here!

Jane McGonigal

Jane featured as a special guest at Practical Utopias: An Exploration of the Possible. The collaborative, virtual learning experience, led by Margaret Atwood, explored practical solutions to humanity's greatest challenges with creativity, innovation, and efficiency in mind.

Learn more about the event here!

Jen Schradie

Jen appears in Tech Policy Press to speak on the 2022 French Presidential Elections in "Digital Democracy and Left Party Politics in the 2022 French Presidential Elections".

Read the article here!