Friday Keynote

Friday, October 12, 2018
5:30 PM – 6:30 PM

More Than Leveling Up: Create Games to Create Change

Alexandrina Agloro

In our contemporary global moment, things can feel hopeless and bleak. And we can all use an escape from the unfolding dumpster fire that is our daily news feed. We know games can be a fun escape, but they are also capable of helping us to imagine a world bigger than ourselves. Expanding outside the genres of games and game studies, what we can learn from our ancestors, speculative fiction, and each other? And how can games help us to sustain, heal, and liberate our communities and our movements? Let’s use interactive media and games to wage love, resist misery, and joymonger.

Alexandrina Agloro is a media artist, community-based researcher, and doula who believes in the possibilities of the decolonial imaginary using ancestral technologies as liberatory tools.

She is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Innovation in the Borderlands at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. As a 2018-2019 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is currently writing a book on global participatory game design in communities of color in South Africa and the United States. Her most recent game, The Resisters, was an alternate reality game she designed through participatory research with young people of color about local social movement history in Providence, RI.

To learn more about Alexandrina Agloro and her work, visit her website.