Research and publications

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/37841

This is scholarship produced by members of IRDL.

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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.
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, Tamara
Recent 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.
Access status: Open Access ,
Making the grade: Feminine lack, inclusion, and coping strategies in digital games higher education
(SAGE Publications, 2021-01-09) Harvey, Alison
The 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’.
Access status: Open Access ,
Alexa : Où donc vont mes données?
(2022) Harvey, Alison; Ioia, Carmina
Access status: Open Access ,
Policy Brief: Recommendations for Improved Inclusion in Work-Integrated Learning and Higher Education Institutions
(2023-06-14) epstein, iris
As part of the AcTinSite project, researchers developed a Policy Brief. The researchers completed this work as part of a Working Group focused on the role that Professional Bodies play in Higher Education. This document provides the body of the policy brief, including recommendations and detailed appendices.
Access status: Open Access ,
Communications - Capitalisme de surveillance
(2022) Ioia, Carmina; Harvey, Allison
Access status: Open Access ,
Communications - Surveillance Capitalism
(2022) Harvey, Allison; Ioia, Carmina
Access status: Open Access ,
Document Landscape: What Shapes Students’ with Disability Experiences in Work-Integrated Learning
(2022) epstein, iris; Baljko, Melanie; Magel, Brooke; Stephens, Lindsay; Dadashi, Nastaran; Smith, Hilda; Bulk, Laura
Colleges and universities have many documents about accommodations for students with disabilities in classrooms. However, there are fewer documents about accommodation during work-integrated learning (WIL). Researchers explored both documents that focus on accommodations in classrooms and during WIL to understand better what makes them useful or unhelpful. They found barriers in the form and content of documents. The form had three barriers, and content had two barriers that you can address to make your documents better
Access status: Open Access ,
Becoming Successful with Disabled Students in the Accommodation's Assemblage: Using Storytelling as Method
(2022) epstein, iris; Rose, Jarrett; Juergensen, Linda; Mykitiuk, Roxanne; MacEntee, Katie; Stephens, Lindsay
As more disabled students enter college and university, the need for accommodations in the classroom and work-integrated learning (WIL)will increase. Storytelling can be a powerful tool to understand how to make the WIL accommodation process easier. Using storytelling, the researchers found that knowing when to access and who are part of the accommodation process is essential. There is also a need for resources for students and instructors when WIL is not going well
Access status: Open Access ,
Model of Inclusion and Access in Participatory Visual Methodologies
(2021-12-09) MacEntee, Katie; Misra, Samhita; Mykitiuk, Roxanne; epstein, iris
Access status: Open Access ,
The Entanglement of Invisible Work and Access in Work Integrated Learning
(2021-10-06) Bulk, Laura Yvonne; Franks, Ashely; Stephens, Lindsay; Dadashi, Nastaran; Balkjo, Melanie; epstein, iris
Although the number of students with disabilities in health professions is increasing, barriers in clinical/placement learning persist. The interdisciplinary AcTinSite team – bringing together perspectives from design, geography, occupational science, nursing, critical disability studies, knowledge mobilization, and more – set out to create a comprehensive resource that might inform access in clinical placements for students with disabilities. As part of the process to understand factors that the AcTinSite resource(s) may need to address, in-depth interviews were conducted. Twentynine participants – 4 placement coordinators, 8 placement supervisors, 6 access professionals, 4 leaders in education (e.g. heads/Deans), 3 leaders in healthcare (e.g. clinical educators), 4 students with disabilities – from two hospitals and two universities participated. Transcripts were analyzed using a collaborative thematic approach. The AcTinSite team found that clinical and academic educators and learners engage in various forms of unrecognized labour to create access: putting in extra time, doing emotional labour, engaging in relational work, and navigating complexities. This labour is unrecognized and optional, and therefore its result – access – is inequitably distributed. We discuss what aspects of this unrecognized labour should be re-valued and recognized by our institutions as important aspects of teaching/learning, and which aspects perhaps should not need to happen. Educators and institutions need to know how access is created in placement education in order to promote diversity within our professions.
Access status: Open Access ,
From Simulation to Imitation: Controllers, Corporeality, and Mimetic Play
(2014-09-16) de Castell, Suzanne; Jenson, Jennifer; Thumlert, K
Background. We contend that a conceptual conflation of simulation and imitation persists at the heart of claims for the power of game-based simulations for learning. Recent changes in controller-technologies and gaming systems, we argue, make this conflation of concepts more readily apparent, and its significant educational implications more evident. Aim. This article examines the evolution in controller technologies of imitation that support players’ embodied competence, rather than players’ ability to simulate such competence. Digital gameplay undergoes an epistemological shift when player and game interactions are no longer restricted to simulations of actions on a screen, but instead support embodied imitation as a central element of gameplay. We interrogate the distinctive meanings and affordances of simulation and imitation and offer a critical conceptual strategy for refining, and indeed redefining, what counts as learning in and from digital games. Method. We draw upon actor-network theory to identify what is educationally significant about the digitally mediated learning ecologies enabled by imitation based gaming consoles and controllers. Actor-network theory helps us discern relations between human actors and technical artifacts, illuminating the complex inter-dependencies and inter-actions of the socio-technical support networks too long overlooked in androcentric theories of human action and cognitive psychology. Conclusion. By articulating distinctions between simulation and imitation, we show how imitative practices afforded by mimetic game controllers and next generation motion-capture technologies offer a different picture of learning through playing digital games, and suggest novel and productive avenues for research and educational practice.
Access status: Open Access ,
Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking relations between technology and educational theory
(Taylor and Francis, 2014-04-14) Thumlert, K; de Castell, Suzanne; Jenson, Jennifer
Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas traditional theories of educational technology tend to focus on the harmonization of new technologies with extant curricular goals and educational practices, an educational theory of technology looks to novel forms of technologically-mediated learning experience—from production pedagogies to role play in the virtual—to make visible the surprising relations, techniques, and opportunities that emerging media, and their attendant social contexts, may offer educational research.
Access status: Open Access ,
Affordances of Equality: Ranciere, Emerging Media, and the New Amateur
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-11-25) Thumlert, K
This article extends a recent educational engagement with the work of Jacques Rancière by linking his meditations on 19th-century worker emancipation to present cultural contexts and media forms. Taking Nick Prior’s (2010) notion of the “new amateur” as point of departure, I argue that new media and attendant production contexts offer an unprecedented occasion for rethinking the educational experiments of Joseph Jacotot (the subject of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1991). By bringing Jacotot’s “method of equality” into relation with present forms of cultural production, I elaborate a notion of affordances of equality that updates Jacotot’s practice of “experimenting with the gap between accreditation and act” (Rancière, 1991, p. 15) —a method that invited learners to improvise in the gap between an expert role and a talent imitable by anyone at all. In conclusion, I ask what educational theory might learn from the new amateur, from the emerging media these amateurs are engaging, and from the production literacies they enact.
Access status: Open Access ,
Transforming school culture through inquiry-driven learning and iPads
(Emerald Publishing, 2018-01-17) Thumlert, K; Owston, Ron; Malhotra, Taru
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a commissioned research study that analyzed a schooling initiative with the ambitious goal of transforming learning environments across the district by advancing innovative, inquiry-driven pedagogical practices combined with 1:1 iPad distribution. The paper explores impacts of the initiative on pedagogical innovation, twenty-first century learning, and related impacts on professional learning, collaboration, and culture change in the pilot schools analyzed in the study. Design/methodology/approach –A multi-dimensional case study approach was used to analyze how the initiative was implemented, and to what extent teaching, learning, and professional cultures were transformed, based on action plan inputs and “change drivers”. Research methods included structured, open-ended interviews conducted with randomly selected teachers and key informants in leadership roles, focus groups held with students, as well as analysis of policy documents, student work samples, and other data sources. Findings –The authors found evidence of a synergistic relationship between innovations in inquiry-driven pedagogy and professional learning cultures, with evidence of increased collaboration, deepened engagement and persistence, and a climate of collegiality and risk-taking at both classroom and organizational levels. Based on initiative inputs, the authors found that innovations in collaborative technology/pedagogy practices in classrooms paralleled similar innovations and transformations in professional learning cultures and capacity-building networks. Practical implications –This initiative analyzed in this paper provides a case study in large-scale system change, offering a compelling model for transformative policies and initiatives where interwoven innovations in pedagogy and technology mobilization are supported by multiple drivers for formal and informal professional learning/development and networked collaboration. Challenges and recommendations are highlighted in the concluding discussion. Originality/value –The transformative initiative analyzed in this paper provides a very timely case-model for innovations in twenty-first century learning and, specifically, for enacting and sustaining large-scale system change where inquiry-driven learning and technology tools are being mobilized to support “deep learning”, “new learning partnerships”, and multilevel transformations in professional learning (Fullan and Donnelly, 2013). This research advances scholarly work in the areas of twenty-first century learning, identifying relationships between technology/pedagogy innovation and professional capital building (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012). Keywords - Professional learning, Collaboration, Professional capital, Whole system transformation, Technology innovation, Inquiry-based learning, Pedagogical innovation Paper type - Research paper
Access status: Open Access ,
Pathways to sustainable futures: A “production pedagogy” model for STEM education
(Futures, 2019-02-19) Alonso Yanez, Gabriela; Thumlert, K; de Castell, Suzanne; Jenson, Jennifer
STEM education initiatives currently pervade the global landscape of educational reform.Unfortunately, the rush to adopt STEM reforms in North American schools and develop students for competitive 21st century knowledge economies has encouraged an uncritical embrace of underlying STEM narratives and purposes, thus foreclosing critical discussion, alternative models, and new perspectives on doing science education differently. Here, we unpack narratives and practices informing STEM education that induct learning actors into ‘anticipatory regimes’ that advance neoliberal ends and techno capitalist ideologies. We argue first that STEM narratives of progress, competition, and innovation increasingly obscure the urgent ecological, ethical and social justice conditions students confront daily. Ironically, this prepares them for a future rendered unsustainable by scientific and technological orthodoxy. We then draw upon critical sustainability studies (CSS) to articulate new axiological orientations that reposition science and technology learning. Lastly, we describe and illustrate an approach aligned with these critical principles–production pedagogy–whose theories and practices re-vision science and technology education. These strategies will situate students in agentive roles now, in this present, using real-world tools in authentic sociotechnical contexts. They can then confront their own capacities and limitations to engage in personally relevant ways, as producers, with techno-scientific knowledge.
Access status: Open Access ,
Past tensions and future possibilities: ARCYP and children’s media studies
(Journal of Children and Media, 2016-01-18) Poyntz, Stuart R.; Coulter, Natalie; Brisson, Geneviève
The year 2007 marked the beginning. The same year JOCAM was launched, an interdisciplinary group of Canadian scholars formed a scholarly association to address the needs of researchers working with young people’s texts and cultures across Canada. In this paper, three members of Association for Research in Cultures of Young People’s (ARCYP’s) Executive examine current and future tensions within children’s media studies by drawing on lessons from ARCYP’s opening decade. Both ARCYP and JOCAM emerged during a time of productive intersections between the fields of children’s studies and media studies. Here, we draw on ARCYP’s history as part of an examination of ongoing lacunae that have arisen as sites of common concern have emerged. These tensions—having to do with notions of textuality and authority, consumption and children’s agency and citizenship and power—point to lacunae in the field of children’s media studies. ARCYP’s history of development is thus taken up as a lens to see the past and imagine the future priorities of our research field.
Access status: Open Access ,
Selling the Male Consumer the Playboy Way
(Popular Communication, 2014-08-06) Coulter, Natalie
Under the direction of Hugh Hefner, Playboy magazine’s early success was predicated upon the unique marketing strategies of forging the persona of an idealized, imaginary reader called the playboy, with particular lifestyles and taste preferences. At the same time, it sold the value of men’s participation in the hedonistic pleasures of accessible connoisseurship of the postwar marketplace by aligning consumer desires with sexual desires as innate components of modern masculinity. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how this persona is visually and discursively articulated throughout the entire Playboy empire, from the content of the magazines including the dewy centerfolds and the What Sort of Man Reads Playboy? campaigns to the brand’s clubs and television shows. The persona undertook the dual tasks of attracting a lucrative male readership and its corresponding advertisers, while simultaneously redefining male consumer culture.
Access status: Open Access ,
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Mythology of DWYL in the Neoliberal Marketplace of Academic Labour
(ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2014-12-01) Coulter, Natalie
Access status: Open Access ,
Separate Playgrounds: Surveying the Fields of Girls’ Media Studies and Boyhood Studies
(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012-07-01) Coulter, Natalie

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