Join us for our next lecture in the Transformative Play Initiative Event Series: “Restorying Trans Game Studies: Playing with Memory, Fiction, and Magic for Transformative Identity Work” by Theresa Jean Tanenbaum!
When: November 29, 2022, 7-8:30pm
Where: Online on Zoom
Register here: https://tinyurl.com/mrkvyf4u
RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/678345303687088/
Desctiption: In this talk, Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess”) argues that game design – like magic and activism – is a framework for invoking and materializing seemingly impossible desires for ourselves and our world. Within the “magic circles” of both play and witchcraft, we assert truths about the world that are decoupled from the often-arbitrary rules and power structures that govern daily life. Building upon work by J Li, Avery Alder, and Jonaya Kemper, Tanenbaum unpacks play as a site for radical, emancipatory identity work as a foundation for an emerging “trans game studies” practice.
Bio: Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess”) is a songwriter, performer, game designer, artist, activist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, where she is a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. Her work is playful, provocative, and interdisciplinary, frequently straddling the line between art, design, and research. She seeks to create possibilities for social and individual change, using participatory narrative to highlight how the identities that we inhabit in the world are contingent and negotiated. These experiences of transformative theatrical play create new models of being that are emancipatory, allowing oppressed and marginalized people to inhabit evocative new identities that reclaim the power and agency denied to them.
This series is hosted by the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. The series explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.
Learn more about Transformative Play at Uppsala and join the TPI mailing list: https://www.speldesign.uu.se/research/games-and-society-lab/transformative-play/
Learn more about the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design: https://www.speldesign.uu.se/research/games-and-society-lab/
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Visuals by Liliia Chorna.