Fwd: Games and Literary Theory 2019 Conference from November 18th to 20th.

[Vinita Teresa]

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From: pramod nayar <pramod...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2019, 06:26
Subject: Fwd: Games and Literary Theory 2019 Conference from November 18th to 20th.
To: Eng Research scholars 2015 <eng-research-...@googlegroups.com>, UoHEnglish <uohenglis...@googlegroups.com>

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From: Souvik Mukherjee <souvi...@presiuniv.ac.in>
Date: Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 9:05 PM
Subject: Games and Literary Theory 2019 Conference from November 18th to 20th.
To:

Dear Sir/ Madam,

The Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata is happy to announce that it will be hosting the Games and Literary Theory 2019 Conference from November 18th to 20th. 

Games and Literary Theory is an annual conference for scholars of literature interested in expanding the scope of literary theory, and game scholars concerned with adapting the methodological and theoretical approaches of literary theory for the study of games. Previous conferences were held in Malta (2013), Amsterdam (2014), New Orleans (2015), Kraków (2016), Montreal (2017) and Copenhagen (2018). The venue for 2019 is, of course, Kolkata.

This is the first time such an international conference on games and literature is being hosted in India. The Dept. of English is happy to host this conference as part of its Digital Humanities initiative.The theme of this year's conference is 'Games at the Margins' and the full call for papers and submission procedure can be found on the conference website: https://gameslit2019.wordpress.com. Abstracts of at least 300 and no more than 700 words (excluding the bibliography), may be submitted until June 30th 2019. All abstracts will undergo a double-blind review. Besides the main conference, there will also be a panel for local scholars - the details of this will be announced later. The full CfP is also pasted below.

We look forward to your participation in the conference - please circulate this announcement among your students and anyone who might be interested. I am happy to receive any queries, suggestions or comments that you may have at this stage. Please block these dates in your calendars. Looking forward to your presence at GamesLit 2019.

Best regards,

Dr SOUVIK MUKHERJEE                                                  
Assistant Professor and Head of Department | Department of English

PRESIDENCY UNIVERSITY, KOLKATA

E souvi...@presiuniv.ac.in    W http://readinggamesandplayingbooks.blogspot.in/

Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave MacMillan 2015)

Videogames and Postcolonialism: The Empire Plays Back (Springer UK 2017)

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Call for Papers: Games and Literary Theory (GamesLit) Conference 2019

Videogames have grown into a global socio-cultural phenomenon and are now a primary concern of Literary and Cultural Studies as well as the Social Sciences. In a medium that sweeps across geographies (including virtual ones), however, the discourse usually privileges a certain section  when it comes to the representation of identity. In a medium, where roleplaying and playing in character is of prime importance, such an ignoring of the marginal and the diverse is indeed problematic.

In one of the first books on the subject, Adrienne Shaw says ‘Teaching classes on minority representation in games, I heard this refrain repeated yet again by my students. Video games are a niche medium; they are fantasy environments; and they are designed for a narrow market. Of course games are not diverse—so what? […] I realized that I recognized myself in my participants’ responses. After all, I too grew up playing a medium for which I was not the primary market and media in which only certain aspects of my identity were ever shown’ (Shaw 2015). Shaw’s concern is an urgent one and recent events related to racism, sexism and other kinds of discrimination in the videogame industry and in the content of the games, highlights the importance of academic dialogues around gaming ‘at the margins’, as it were.

These concerns, of course, echo much older debates on diversity and difference in Literary and Cultural Studies. Identity and indeed, even the body, are constructs in the Foucauldian framework of biopower and beyond the actual control of individuals. Thinkers such as Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva and bell hooks point out how the the body is marginalised based on gender, race and class. Similarly, the constructedness of the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Oriental’ in colonial discourse as shown by Edward Said and also how the colonial system also renders certain groups of people ‘subaltern’ and how this affects the discourse of diversity as Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak and Homi Bhabha make evident. Often, the discourse of diversity and the margins pervades games as well although the connection is not often made evident in the older and more traditional disciplines.

Recent games scholarship has started addressing issues of diversity in games through the new Diversity Group that is now part of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), books on gender, race and colonialism (Shaw 2015; Murray 2018; Mukherjee 2017) as well as edited journal issues and panel discussions. As crucial to discussions of both games and literary theory, these issues form the main theme of this year’s Games and Literary Theory Conference, being held in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India. 

We welcome papers on but not restricted to the following topics:

• Representations of diverse games in literature.
  
• Remediating marginality: from non-canonical literature to games.
  
• Studying games with literary theory: from the center to the margins.
  
• Marginalized discourses of gaming culture.
  
• Peripheral aesthetics and central gameplay: interplay between locally-inspired game content and gameplay conventions.
  
• Digital and non-digital games as tools to resist inequality and erasure.
  
• Representations of gender, queerness, race, class and caste in games vis a vis literature.
  
• Applying concepts of colonization,  migration, and diasporas in understanding game spaces.
  
• The connection between violence in gaming and White, cis-heteropatriarchal gender norms.
  
• The language of the “digital frontier” in gaming and tech cultures
  
• Diversity practices and games studies.
  
• Empathy games that engage with racism and the ‘refugee’ experience.
  
• Decolonizing struggles in the gaming industry around labour and money
  
• Digital Humanities from the margins vis a vis gamer culture in Global North vs. the Global South.
  

--

Pramod K. Nayar
Department of English
The University of Hyderabad
Prof CR Rao Road
Gachibowli
Hyderabad
India 500 046
      Tel. 91.40.23133407;  91.40.23133400

http://www.uohyd.ac.in/index.php/academics/2011-10-27-18-38-04/school-of-humanities/dept-english

https://sites.google.com/site/pramodknayar/

https://uohyd.academia.edu/pramodKNayar 

 

 

 

 

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