Appearances

Feb 20-23

Southwest Popular Culture Association

Hyatt Regency Hotel and Conference Center in Albuquerque, NM

“Have Fun, But Make Sure that You Still Look Pretty: Animating Video Game Adaptations of the Disney Princesses”

Animation Studies Panel #1

9:00 am on Saturday in Fiesta III

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Feb 23 – 24

Lubbock-Con

Lubbock Memorial Civic Center in Lubbock, TX

Game Design Improv

Fandom, Industry, and Identity

Time and Location TBA

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April 17 – 20

National Popular Culture Association Conference

Washington Marriott Wardman Park in Washington D.C.

“Why White Supremacists are Using Online Video Games to Recruit and How to Stop Them”

Time and Location TBA

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Projects

Editor of Forthcoming Special Issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

“Imagining Alternatives”

From Afrofuturism to dystopian, apocalyptic fiction to alternate history to ecofeminism and cli-fi, authors of speculative fictions have been interrogating alternative worlds in literature, film, television, comic books, and video games. These visions give us access to alien planets as well as alternative perspectives on our own pasts, presents, and possible futures. They reflect our hopes and fears; they offer new narratives of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality; they suggest the magic and the horror embedded in our own realities.

This special issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities invites authors to interrogate imagined alternatives to existing systems of knowledge and distributions of power. We are interested in submissions engaging with a wide variety of subjects, genres, mediums, time periods, and national origins: from cyberpunk to steampunk, and from Gothic fiction to fan fiction. We also want to encourage authors to imagine alternative formats for their own work. In addition to traditional essays, we will also consider roundtables, interviews, photo essays, web comics, YouTube videos, Flash animations, web-based games, and other creative works.

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Game projects: I’m working with Kishonna Gray on an RPG about the recent spate of “Barbeque Becky” stories in the news (based loosely on John Scalzi‘s “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficult Setting There Is“) and another game project modeled after Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics but with the definition of video games as its subject.

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Conceptualizing a couple of new pieces on the gendering of artificial intelligences as well as a piece on the rhetoric of the “digital native” and how it captures the utopian desires and the neoliberal failings of Internet culture.

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Serving on the Editorial Board for:

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds published by Intellect Books