Department of Global Communication and Cultures
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/42300
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Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Best Practice or Buzzword? the Opportunities and Challenges of Mentorship for EDI in Creative Technology(John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2025-04-13) Harvey, Alison; Shepherd, Tamara; Rudnicka-Lavoie, Dani; Mohabir, EmilyThis paper explores mentorship as a much-celebrated strategy for improving equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) across a range of exclusionary working sectors. As a tactic for addressing underrepresentation and scaffolding entry, progression, and success within historically homogenous industries, mentorship is seen as a normatively beneficial practice. Yet, despite its association with greater opportunities and potential for breaking barriers, mentorship is rarely defined and how it is enacted is typically absent from discussion. Our research project tackles this ambiguity on the impact of mentorship for EDI aims and values, with a specific focus on creative and technological industries where exclusions in participation remain pernicious. Drawing on critical feminist analysis of public-facing materials about mentorship in these sectors and 40 interviews with mentorship program organizers and creative tech workers who have engaged in mentorship relationships, we outline the characteristics of mentorship activities from the perspective of three key stakeholders in EDI- corporate units such as employee resource groups, third-party companies who provide mentorship services to organizations and individuals, and community groups featuring mentorship as part of their activities. Our exploration of these three distinct models of mentorship demonstrates that the context where these activities are organized shapes their implementation, evaluation, and overall potential impacts, including for intersectional feminist aims. We conclude by arguing for the value of communal-based approaches to mentorship for more transformative outcomes related to equity, diversity, and inclusion.Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Minorités linguistiques de langue officielle au Canada : citoyenneté, pouvoir et frontières linguistiques(Wißner-Verlag, 2025) Lebel, Marie Elaine; Garon, francisIn this article, which combines political science and critical applied linguistics, we analyze how linguistic boundaries in Canada, more specifically in Quebec and Ontario, have evolved and influence the power of so-called ‘official language’ minorities in the exercise of citizenship. We aim to better understand how language issues contribute to shaping the contours of a political community, how they can foster inequalities, and how they are related to power relations. We are particularly interested in the effective power of official language minorities within the French-English boundaries, according to Tollefson's (2015) three conceptions of power: state power, ideological power, and discursive power. After examining the issue of citizenship in relation to linguistic boundaries and the formation of French-English linguistic boundaries in Canada from a historical perspective, we provide an over-view of Quebec’s anglophone minority and Ontario’s francophone minority, where the mismatch between the three forms of power are indicators of a hierarchical citizenship within the respective provinces.Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Lady Game Club: The Popular Feminist Politics of Women-in-Games Organizations(2024-11-07) Fisher, Stephanie Judith; Coulter, Natalie‘Feminism in games’ is a large, dispersed, and networked movement that is happening in online and offline spaces. This research seeks to illuminate how inequities can be reproduced within a feminist community through a close examination of Lady Game Club (LGC), a non-profit organization that teaches women how to make digital games. Drawing on the feminist theories of ‘platform feminism’ (Singh, 2021) and ‘popular feminism’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018), I theorize LGC as a platform for popular feminism in games. This study employs community-engaged ethnographic methods, specifically participant-observation and interviews, to analyse the feminist logics that are built into the structure of LGC and practiced by the women game-makers who are a part of this community. By examining the feminist politics of LGC, this study demonstrates the limits of popular feminism in creating an inclusive and equitable games industry and challenging systems of oppression. LGC takes a direct representation approach to feminist activism. It is designed to get more (white and middle-class) women into the games industry, but not to change it. As a platform, LGC elevates and amplifies popular feminism’s normative modes of feminist resistance (i.e., ‘women’s individual empowerment’) while obscuring other forms of feminist resistance, such and those based in survival, care, and refusal. The organization structures feminist politics as an individual politics rather than a collective one, foreclosing the possibility for feminist resistances that are based on collective action or thinking about oppression as systemic or 'built in' (Benjamin, 2019). Although LGC is enmeshed in and reinforces the hegemonic systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, it also creates an opening in the public’s imagination for a more equitable game industry.Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , When passion isn’t enough: gender, affect and credibility in digital games design(SAGE Publications, 2016-03-02) Harvey, Alison; Shepherd, TamaraRecent controversies around identity and diversity in digital games culture indicate the heightened affective terrain for participants within this creative industry. While work in digital games production has been characterized as a form of passionate, affective labour, this article examines its specificities as a constraining and enabling force. Affect, particularly passion, serves to render forms of game development oriented towards professionalization and support of the existing industry norms as credible and legitimate, while relegating other types of participation, including that by women and other marginalized creators, to subordinate positions within hierarchies of production. Using the example of a women-in-games initiative in Montreal as a case study, we indicate how linkages between affect and competencies, specifically creativity and technical abilities, perpetuate a long-standing delegitimization of women’s work in digital game design.Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Making the grade: Feminine lack, inclusion, and coping strategies in digital games higher education(SAGE Publications, 2021-01-09) Harvey, AlisonThe barriers faced by women in games production have been firmly established, including well-documented harassment and material forms of structural discrimination such as gender pay gaps. At the same time, the explanation that homogeneity in the games industry is due to a ‘leaky pipeline’ between training and the workforce persists, extending discourse familiar from the history of computing. Games higher education, the presumed feeder for diverse talent, remains underexplored despite the increasingly compulsory nature of university degrees in job postings. This article addresses the gap by exploring the experiences and perspectives of students studying games subjects in five UK universities. Based on thematic analysis of interviews, I argue that efforts to ‘get in’ to exclusionary tech spaces based on discourses of feminine lack fail to account for how these environments require marginalized people to develop strategies for coping with exclusionary norms to ‘stay in’.Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Alexa : Où donc vont mes données?(2022) Harvey, Alison; Ioia, CarminaItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Communications - Capitalisme de surveillance(2022) Ioia, Carmina; Harvey, AllisonItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Communications - Surveillance Capitalism(2022) Harvey, Allison; Ioia, Carmina