Five months after its release, scholars are still meticulously dissecting Ryan Coogler's film in the hopes of gaining a thorough understanding of its impact on the black community. The 2018 San Diego Comic Convention panel "Beyond Wakanda: Intersectional Afrofuturism" analyzed "Black Panther" as well as the literary works of Octavia Butler, a black feminist and science fiction author, through the lens of Afrofuturism while encouraging audience engagement. Afrofuturism is a black aesthetic, philosophical and artistic movement that dates back to the mid-20th century, said panelist Dalena Hunter, an archivist and librarian at the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. Among other panelists discussing the movement were Shani Miller and Kelly Besser, UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive and Library Special Collections archivists, respectively, as well as UC Irvine assistant professor Roderic Crooks.
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Gillian Hayes, a professor who works on human-computer interaction at University of California Irvine, says the Plataine project and plugging Google's AI services into Glass play to the strengths of the controversial hardware. … "Image and voice recognition technology getting better will make wearable devices more functional," Hayes says.
While Gone Home isn't a new game (it debuted in 2013), it has set a new standard for role playing video games where the player embodies someone going through a realistic life experience. …."You can still make choices you feel good about or feel bad about. There's almost a moral component," says Bonnie Ruberg, professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine and a scholar of queer video games.
Read the full story at Bustle.
Informatics Ph.D. students Spencer Ruelos and Amanda Cullen had their article titled "A Ludicrous Relationship? A Conversation between Anthropology and Game Studies" published on Platypus, the official blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. The blog post discusses the need for those who work in both game studies and anthropology to build deeper connections between the two disciplines in order to help scholars overcome finding themselves lacking a sense of academic belonging in either field.
Read the full blog post on Platypus.
Read the full story at Inside Higher Ed.
Steinkuehler is one of the leading researchers in this space. Before coming to UCI she served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House Executive Office. Now she studies how schools can connect esports and academics.
Read the full story at SportTechie.