Ropes Lecture by Lisa Nakamura "Flag as Inappropriate: Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Online Games" - Jan 12th!

From McMicken Arts & Sciences:

Ropes Lecture: Lisa Nakamura

Thursday, January 12 at 7:00 p.m.

Taft Research Center, 2625 Clifton Ave.

“Flag as Inappropriate: Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Online Games”  

Lisa Nakamura points out that digital games scholars who study race, gender, and sexuality within games often focus on racist and sexist images, narratives, and representations within games themselves. However, players often experience the most virulent types of discrimination and hate speech at the hands of other players. Women, people of color, and gay gamers are producing a growing resistance to this culture. 

This talk examines born-digital media campaigns against racism, sexism, and homophobia in the form of blogs, YouTube videos, and other web-based media documents and archives that critique instances of gaming racism, sexism, and homophobia.

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Lisa Nakamura is Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies and Cinema Studies Department and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008, winner of the 2010 Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Cultural Studies), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000) and Race After the Internet (Routledge, forthcoming 2011).