Monday, May 19, 2014

Exciting research plans for the summer

Now on the other side of my first academic year on the Tenure Track, I'm happy to say that the whirring of the machine has not stopped here at Constructing Amusement.

Teaching: Courses I've taught in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago so far include: Communication and New Media, Game Studies, Critical Ethnography, and Intro to Digital Media (Grad).

Ethics: At the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy, we host an annual symposium and I'm delighted to share that this year our featured speaker is Anita Sarkeesian, who very much embodies emergent issues in Digital Ethics and Policy.  This year's takes place November 7th, just before NCA in Chicago.

Research Infrastructure and Service: With my SOC colleagues, I've co-founded our Social & Interactive Media Lab (SIMLab).  We've kicked things off with a fantastic Open House and lunchtime speaker series of topics at the intersection of Technology and Society.  More exciting things to come there.

Speaking: In the next two weeks, I'll be presenting work at the International Communication Association's annual meeting (ICA), the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA), and the Canadian Communication Association as part of Congress 2014 of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 

Field Research: I am happy to say that I am embarking on a fieldwork sojourn in Europe and Asia, having been awarded a Summer Research Stipend from Loyola University Chicago.  As part of my project on "Asian and European contexts of social and mobile gaming industries: the global dynamics of big data and micro practices in flux," I'll be spending June in Finland and July in South Korea building upon prior work in this area and adding to a corpus of comparative contextual studies in digital lifestyles.

In the immediate: Hard to believe at this time in 2 weeks I'll be in Jyväskylä, Finland, where I've been invited as a Visiting Scholar and will be bouncing around Angry Bird-ing my way to other cities within Finland including Tampere and Helsinki.  I'm very much looking forward to meeting with Finnish researchers in the games and tech community with an eye on everyday users as they engage with digital devices and culture (kind of a recurring theme:).

Then, slingshotting myself to the land of KakaoTalk (South Korea) for what serves to commemorate 10 years since visiting South Korea for fieldwork the first time in 2004! So much has changed since then, and it is such a privilege to bear witness to just a small portion of such a dynamic national context.

Of course there's more, so watch this space and in the everyday @cheeflo @SimLabChicago for more frequent updates.

As the Terran Firebats like to say: Jacked up and good to go!