Faculty of Information, U of T | Supervisor: Nicole Cohen
Project Title: Amid the Pink Collar: Dressing Up Against Precarity & Patriarchy in Game Streaming
What are you hoping to learn as a CDHI fellow?
As a CDHI Fellow, I hope to develop online community defence resources for BIPOC, women and non-binary creators in the North American games industry. I am learning how to expand the interactive capacities of my Twine dress-up game, Amid the Pink Collar. During my fellowship, this game will develop into a public digital humanities resource that asks us to join game streamers in politicizing our relationships to domestic work and play spaces.
How did you first learn about digital methods and what attracts you to this kind of research?
Feminist game scholarship necessitates ongoing conversations with digital methods. How do we study online player communities without amplifying the online harms they face? These research questions attract me because they often result in the creation of digital objects, in addition to practices, that can be used beyond academia.
What digital technologies or research methods do you use in your research?
Webcams are central to my research—both as struggle sites in digital work and play, but also as a medium through which actors in my research communities of practices collaborate and play with each other. I am also interested in how the rise of Zoom add-ons (like backgrounds and filter) further gamify how we come to and look at each other in the field.
What is one of your hobbies or something you like to do to unwind?
I crochet many hats for somebody with just one head.
Christine H. Tran is a digital performance artist and 5th-year PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Information. Their SSHRC-funded dissertation explores the interplay of gender, race, and domestic work in the careers of professional game streamers on Amazon’s Twitch.tv platform. Their work on Internet culture, digital labour, and liveness in ludic media has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Television & New Media, Communication, Culture & Critique and New Media & Society. In addition to the CDHI, Christine has held fellowships at the Centre for Culture and Technology and Massey College.