CSCI Research Seminar Series: Emily Godden and Emma Reay

Events — Research Event MS Teams
26 April 2022, 16:00

Emily Godden’s current research explores the ‘Lost City’ of Dunwich through a series of investigations that involve interactive, narrative-driven virtual heritage. The project documents the environmental heritage of the region and also takes W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (1995) as a point of departure to explore Dunwich as it is today. Disparate and interconnected stories are networked in Emily’s project, to make a series of interactive practice-led research outputs developed via a sustainable media archaeology practice.

Emily Godden is a lecturer in Digital Media Production at Anglia Ruskin University and PhD student with StoryLab. Outside of academia Emily is the Director and founder of award-winning social enterprise Virtually There Studio CIC. Virtually There Studio works with humans in East Anglia to produce exhibitions, events and educational opportunities to improve digital literacy and reconnect with nature.

Emma Reay’s presentation will involve sharing some of her findings from a recent content analysis exploring representations of children in contemporary videogames. She will describe some of the patterns that emerged surrounding the rhetorical function of the figure of 'the child' in these texts and present a taxonomy of child types designed to facilitate the critical analysis of child characters across different media.

Dr. Emma Reay is a lecturer in Media and Communication at Anglia Ruskin University and a lecturer in Game Design at the University of Southampton. Her research is located at the intersection of games studies, childhood studies, representation studies, and education research. She aims to move conversations beyond questions of whether videogames are 'good' or 'bad' for child players and towards questions of how videogames produce childhood as a conceptual category and social institution in Western contexts.

Everyone Welcome!

'Minecraft Block and Biomes' – screenshot by Emily Godden
'Minecraft Block and Biomes' – screenshot by Emily Godden

Event contact: simon.payne@aru.ac.uk