T&T on Campus
In an ongoing speaker series to connect T&T students with influential thinkers in the field, T&T welcomed environmental games scholar Alenda Chang and T&T alum Michelle Ferrier, who returned to share her ongoing work at the intersection of scholarship and entrepreneurship in facing the challenges of social media.
T&T students were recognized for their research and teaching: Keidra Daniels Navaroli was awarded both the UCF and Statewide Graduate Research Symposium Arts and Humanities Award. Several T&T students and faculty were recognized at UCF Founders Day: student Farrah Cato received the CAH Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award; T&T director Anastasia Salter received the CAH Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award; and T&T faculty member Mel Stanfill was recognized with the University Award for Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students.
T&T’s work to build research community on campus this year culminates with hosting the international Console-ing Passions Feminist Media Studies Conference, an event that has been many years in planning and will bring approximately 300 scholars together through both in-person and virtual presentations in June 2022.
T&T at Conferences
As many conferences in the field remain virtual, T&T scholars have been innovating in sharing their research, presenting at ten different conferences this year, both online and returning to in-person events. Students, faculty, and alumni represented T&T with a large presence at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies with 9 presentations, including “Sell Your Cards to Who: Non-Fungible Tokens and Digital Trading Card Games” from T&T student Jack Murray.
T&T also had a strong presence at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Design of Communication with 5 presentations including student Alessandra Zinicola Lopez’s poster, “Baking Bread with Domestic Technical Illustration: 19th – 21st Centuries” and “Understanding User Expertise through Lived Experience: Making Natural Hazard Risk and Mitigation Information More Accountable to Users” from student Amanda Altamirano and faculty member Sonia Stephens.
At the Association of Internet Researchers conference, our impressive delegation of eight T&T faculty, alumni, and graduate student authors were recognized for their fun and informative video presentations, including work on pandemic craft and feminist data visualization from student Abigail Moreshead and director Anastasia Salter and work on Black Twitter’s political humor during COVID-19 from student Anshare Antoine and faculty Mel Stanfill.
T&T in Print
T&T students published innovative work across multiple fields this year. Here are a few highlights from their publications:
- Keidra Daniels Navaroli highlighted important and dynamic work in textile and fiber arts leading “to healing, freedom, and liberation” as guest juror for the international exhibition in print “From Confrontation to Catharsis” of the Surface Design Journal (Fall 2021).
- Dan Cox offered a resource for the teaching of programming and game design with his new book Dynamic Story Scripting with the ink Scripting Language (Packt Publishing, 2021).
- Bonnie Cross drew attention to the way changing animation dynamics in hypertext comics opens new possibilities for horror storytelling in her article “Restless Figures: Animated Horror Stories as Hypertext” (ImageTexT Journal, Issue 13.1)
- Francine Sutton explored the significance of social media fandom as a space for documentation and fan archiving around the World Wrestling Entertainment events in her article “Pro-wrestling fandom and digital archives of wrestling event merchandise” (Transformative Works and Cultures, Volume 36).
- Current T&T student PS Berge collaborated with incoming T&T student Daniel Heslep on a critical intervention in understanding the popular social media and community chat platform Discord in their article “Mapping Discord’s darkside: Distributed hate networks on Disboard” (New Media & Society, 2021).
- T&T student Lauren Rouse collaborated with a T&T faculty member to investigate platform exploitation of gendered labor in their article “”Cosplay on Demand? Instagram, OnlyFans, and the Gendered Fantrepreneur” (Social Media + Society, 2021).
- Kirk Lundblade examined the impact of historical gaming streams on our collective understanding of history in his article “Watch Me Make History: Reenacting and Remaking the Past in Historical Game Live Streams” (Popular Culture Studies Journal, Volume 9, Issue 2).
— Anastasia Salter, Director of Graduate Programs and Texts and Technology
