Högskolan i Skövde

This chapter is a collaborative meeting point for two educators at the intersection of performing arts and technology, who share a focus on topics often considered too subjective or taboo within teaching and learning, such as empathy, compassion, and interconnectivity. Even our focus on teaching and learning, because we are outside the pedagogy field, can seem transgressive, in technologically inflected disciplines where “hard” science research may be privileged. In contrast, we characterize teaching as a spiritual, activist endeavor centered in intuition and decolonizing practices and highlight the collaborative and embodied nature of our inquiry through autoethnographic duet as method. For us, teaching is personal, given the complexities of our identities. We both experience power and oppression in different contexts, including the classroom. From this intersectional feminist grounding, we reflect on our own formative student experiences and what has been modeled for us by teachers and mentors inside and outside of institutional settings. Through this critical, collaborative reflection we draw out a set of practices that come together to make transformative, cocreated learning possible across courses relevant to the Digital Humanities, such as multimedia performance, game design, storytelling, and music. We discuss ideas for how these practices seek to assemble not only mind but also body and spirit in the act of teaching and learning and can be utilized to remake and refashion more traditional curricula such that transformation, as opposed to information, becomes the goal.

As videogames become an increasingly dominant popular cultural form it is important to ask what it means to spend time at play in games today. Videogames have a contested reputation with respect to time. There is the archetypal figure of the time- divorced gamer, who proceeds to play for hours on end, disregarding even basic human needs. There is the notion of games as a waste of time, closely linked to the ideas of games as a pleasant way to pass time, as in the trend of casual games or games played on mobile phones. In contrast, there is the idea of games as a way to accelerate learning or save time, as opposed to more traditional forms of education or training. And then there are the more formal design values of flow and replayability in videogames, which are leveraged by designers seeking to harness time in ways perhaps unique to the digital games medium. What do these relationships between humans, machines, and gameplay have to say about how we live today? This chapter illuminates historical threads of game- time, including the histories of the clock and the computer, to better under- stand how we experience time as we play, and how this experience of game- time informs our understanding of what it means to have fun in the world today.

How is game research constructed and enacted as a discipline, or anti-discipline, in contemporary culture and academia? In a field often heralded for and defined by interdisciplinarity, how is identity developed? Who gets to say what counts as games scholarship, and who can participate? In this article we offer a counter-reading of game research's oft-deployed concept of interdisciplinarity, highlighting how interdisciplinary commitments can serve to support neoliberal formations of the university and undermine political scholarship as much as they can serve as a liberatory framework. As the field of game research continues to institutionalize, with undergraduate programs and new graduate programs growing in size and number, and as new junior scholars enter the academic workforce, conversation is needed about the character of the field’s interdisciplinarity. How game research can structure itself to act as a supportive and protective force for junior, marginalized and precarious scholars is not just a question of university administration, but of the epistemic underpinnings of the field itself.

What are the matters of philosophy? How do they shape how philosophy is practiced, what kinds of knowledge it produces, and who counts as a philosopher? The dominant matters of Western philosophy, or its epistemic companions, are books and journal articles even when dialogic and oral traditions are acknowledged or referenced. In this paper, we argue that alternatives would be necessary if philosophy were to be a more capacious and welcoming discipline. We introduce Feminist Philosophical Toys as one such alternative that challenges what counts as serious philosophy by being seriously playful. The toys foreground the oral and the dialogic while reflecting on and committing to engaging materiality, record-keeping, and record-making. In doing so, the toys challenge the dominant form of philosophy and its mechanics of knowledge-making as they offer an alternative way of doing philosophy that can be transformative for the next generation of feminist scholarship. The dialogic, embodied, and communal interaction with paper, with theory, and with others is meant as a practice of live theorization, opening philosophy to a new groundedness and accessibility, centered in the ethos of feminist epistemology, while at the same time pushing against fetishization of matter.