Live Chat: Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies

Live Chat | Webinar: Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies

Date: Monday 29th June 2020

Time: 3-4pm BST. Check your timezone here 

Registration: Please register here

To join the webinar: Please install the Zoom meetings application from the Zoom Download Centre before the webinar. 

The Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies OLH Special Collection is a freely accessible curated collection of scholarly articles. Launched in 2018 as a special edition of the Open Library of Humanities journal, the collection brings questions of Postcolonialism to the forefront of Games Studies, featuring articles that provide critical analysis of colonial representations in games and challenge notions of colonial power studies. Two years after its publication, the collection has been viewed over 14,000 times, and offers a key contribution to contemporary scholarship on Game Studies and Postcolonialism.

This live chat with the collection’s guest editors, Dr Souvik Mukherjee and Dr Emil Lundedal Hammar, is hosted by Dr Rose Harris-Birtill from the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). The live chat is both a celebration of the special collection and the growing relationship between Games Studies scholars and the OLH, and a reflection on how games contribute to our cultural, social and aesthetic experiences in the world around us.

Panelists:

Dr Souvik Mukherjee is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Presidency University, Kolkata, India. Souvik has been researching videogames as an emerging storytelling medium since 2002, examining their relationship to canonical ideas of narrative and also how these games inform and challenge current conceptions of technicity, identity, culture and postcolonialism. He is the author of two monographs, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK 2017). Besides maintaining an active interest in issues related to portrayals of empire and postcolonialism in videogames, he is also currently involved in researching ancient Indian boardgames. Souvik has been named a ‘DiGRA Distinguished Scholar’ by the Digital Games Research Association.

Besides a range of topics in Game Studies, Souvik researches and teaches Early Modern English Literature and (the) Digital Humanities. More details about his research, publications and thoughts on the subject can be found on his blog ‘Ludus ex Machina’.

Dr Emil Lundedal Hammar has a PhD in Game and Memory Studies from UiT - The Arctic University of Norway. He has published widely on issues of cultural memory, political economy, race, colonialism and digital games. His research interests include critical race theory, the political economy of communication, critical and materialist approaches to media, and postcolonialism.

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