Weston Game Lab Speaker Series: "Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming"

The Weston Game Lab welcomes Dr. Kishonna Gray to the MADD Center to deliver a talk entitled "Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming." 

Intersectional tech can be understood as the visual, textual, and/or oral engagement of the Black body in and around digital gaming culture. By providing a critical deconstruction of the exploited, hypervisible, labor of Black performances, Dr. Gray will explore these practices and responses inside oppressive technological structures by focusing the transformative resistance practices by many of these Black users. 

Dr. Kishonna Gray is an Assistant Professor in Communication and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Her work broadly intersects identity and digital media although she has a particular focus on video games and gaming culture.  By examining game context and culture, her most recent book, Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live examines the reality of women and people of color in one of the largest gaming communities.  Her upcoming book project, tentatively titled "On Being Black And....In Contemporary Gaming Culture: The Journey to Intersectionality" features data from her (almost) 10 year ethnographic project on Xbox Live. It is currently under contract at LSU Press. 

Dr. Gray's work has been featured in the Sociology Compass, Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, ADA: A Journal of New Media and Technology, the Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society, the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, and others. Her work has also been featured in the LA Times, New York Times, Paste Magazine, Engadget, The Guardian, BET, and Blavity.  She is a featured blogger and podcaster with "Not Your Mama's Gamer.

RSVP required: space is limited. Lunch will be served. 

Contact

Weston Game Lab
westongamelab@uchicago.edu

Admission

Free