DiGRA Nominations
Christopher Paul – vice president
Hanna Wirman – open seat
Lindsay Grace – open seat
Marcus Carter – open seat
Souvik Mukherjee – open seat
Chris Paul, Vice President
Position Statement: As Vice President I want to continue to grow my role within DiGRA, especially in supporting our efforts to diversify our community. I believe the founding of the Diversity Working Group was a solid first step in the direction of positive momentum and I would like to see DiGRA continue looking into efforts that could lead to a more diverse group of faculty, students, and practitioners. I think keys to this movement will be assessing where we can best hold conferences, how we might be able to include remote participants, and how we can help encourage attendance from new communities.
In addition to diversity, I believe that it will be important for DiGRA to continue to pursue opportunities to provide access to quality scholarship through efforts like the Digital Library and ToDiGRA. The Digital Library is an excellent resource and a wonderful way to both report research and expand the impact of the organization.
Christopher Paul joined Seattle University in 2008 after teaching for three years at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and receiving his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His teaching and scholarly work focus on applying tools rooted in rhetorical analysis to elements of new media, especially video games. Christopher published Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games with Routledge in 2012.
Hanna Wirman, Open Seat
Position Statement: It would be my great pleasure to continue as a DiGRA Executive Board member and my duties related to chapter matters. DiGRA is growing internationally and there is more interest for local chapters. Based on a chapter review which was carried out this year, I would build stronger collaboration between regional chapters, chapter visibility at the annual conferences and work towards increasing membership figures around the world. I would also continue representing East Asia in the board.”
Dr. Hanna Wirman is a current member of the DiGRA Executive Board and the President of Chinese DiGRA. With background in media and cultural studies, she works as a Research Assistant Professor at the School of Design of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University leading a MSc program in game development. Hanna researches emerging player groups and social innovation in games. Her work on gender, identity, co-creativity, and animal play has been published in a number of journals and books. Hanna’s current research approaches non-human animals as players as she builds games for orangutans’ enrichment and for cross-species communication.
Lindsay Grace, Open Seat
Position Statement: If elected to an open seat I am most interested in nurturing the DiGRA dynamic through wider outreach, increased accessibility and continued critical assessment of the organizations contributions to academic research. I would be interested in continuing to promote diversity among DiGRA’s contributing members. I am also passionate about encouraging artists, designers and other creative researchers to participate in our community of game studies research. To this end I am particular excited about evaluating the many ways that the organization can improve it’s resources to better serve the discipline.
Lindsay is an associate professor at American University and founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio. His game designs have received awards from the Games for Change Festival, Meaningful Play, Advances in Computer Entertainment and others. He has published more than 40 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His creative work has been selected for showcase in more than eight countries and 12 states, including New York, Paris, Rio De Janeiro, Singapore, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Chicago and Vancouver. He has given talks at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), SXSW, Games for Change Festival/Tribeca Film Festival, the Boston Festival of Independent Games and many others. He is currently the Vice President of the Global Game Jam™ and served on the board for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) between 2013 and 2015. He has organized and co-organized the Blank Arcade at the DiGRA conference and continues to foster an inclusive environment for the wide variety of games researchers in and out of the DiGRA community.
Marcus Carter, Open Seat
Position Statement: I am nominating for an open-seat on the DiGRA Board. I am doing so to contribute to the growth and success of DIGRA internationally, and represent non EU/NA regional DiGRAs. As a founding member of DiGRA Australia, I believe that regional DiGRA chapters will play an important role in the next decade developing our game studies community, particularly for scholars unable to regularly attend international conferences. I support improved services for fee-paying DiGRA members, co-locating DIGRA with other conferences, initiatives like ToDIGRA to provide more publication opportunity, and growing the DiGRA conference in size and esteem. I am opposed to the ‘Di’ in DiGRA. GRA!
Dr. Marcus Carter is a Research Fellow in the Microsoft Social NUI Centre, at The University of Melbourne. His PhD explored the practices and experiences involved in treacherous play in EVE Online, and he has also conducted studies on player experience in DayZ, Warhammer 40,000, and Candy Crush Saga. With Kelly Bergstrom and Darryl Woodford, he has edited a collection on EVE Online which will be published by The University of Minnessota Press in 2016. He is the treasurer and founding member of DiGRA Australia, he was the chair of the inaugural DiGRA Australia conference in 2014, and is an editor of a special issue of the ToDIGRA Journal on Australian Game Studies.
Souvik Mukherjee, Open Seat
Position Statement: I would like to submit my candidature for one of the two Open seats. Having been a videogames researcher since 2002, I have been able to observe closely and with much interest the growth and development of the discipline. However, although gaming is a global phenomenon, some geographies and communities are less represented in Game Studies – for example, scholars from the Indian subcontinent, other Asian countries, the African nations and also South America. Also, the discipline has much more scope of linking up to more traditionally mainstream subjects in the Humanities, Social Sciences and other areas of research.
As a member of the DiGRA board, I would like to address the two issues mentioned above as my priorities: global representation and wider academic outreach. I am also particularly interested in making a connection with the fast-growing new and related discipline of (the) Digital Humanities. Finally, I was much influenced by the workshop on the pedagogy of Game Studies in the last DiGRA conference and would like to explore further avenues in addressing related issues.
Dr Souvik Mukherjee is currently employed as Assistant Professor of English Literature at Presidency University (earlier Presidency College), Calcutta. Souvik has been researching videogames as an emerging storytelling medium since 2002 and has completed his PhD on the subject from Nottingham Trent University in 2009. Souvik has done his postdoctoral research in the Humanities faculty of De Montfort University, UK and as a research associate at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India where he worked on digital media as well as narrative analysis.
His research examines their relationship to canonical ideas of narrative and also how videogames inform and challenge current conceptions of technicity, identity and culture, in general. His current interests involve researching videogames in the postcolonial world, the analysis of paratexts of videogames such as walkthroughs and after-action reports as well as the concept of time and telos in videogames. Besides Game Studies, his other interests are (the) Digital Humanities and Early Modern Literature.
