Dear Colleagues,

 

Team DLF is thrilled to reveal the featured speaker for this year’s DLF Forum: Dr. Kishonna Gray, an eminent scholar and advocate for Black digital storytelling in gaming! We’re excited to hear from Dr. Gray in November in St. Louis, MO, USA.

 

Dr. Gray will be presenting Archiving Cultures: Gaming as Black Digital Storytelling.

 

About this talk

While conversations on contemporary video games often focus on violence, online harms, and the military industrial complex, they can also be sites of so much more. Black gamers recognize the contentious relationships with gaming and work to resist and reframe and create spaces of community, support, and culture. As such, this presentation will focus on gaming as a place where Black history and culture can be told outside conventional tropes and stereotypes that often pervade media. Streaming cultures also provide the ability to tell one’s own story using digital tools.

 

About Dr. Kishonna Gray

Dr. Kishonna Gray is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University. Dr. Gray is the author or co-editor of numerous books and articles including her foundational 2014 work Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins, 2018’s edited collections “Woke Gaming and Feminism in Play” and most recently “Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming.” She also has a book currently under contract with NYU Press entitled “Black Game Studies.”

 

Read Dr. Gray’s full bio on our event website: https://forum2023.diglib.org/featured-speakers/. There you’ll also find information about the keynote speaker for NDSA’s Digital Preservation, Jamie A. Lee, Associate Professor at University of Arizona.

 

Stay tuned for more updates and announcements of registration opening for all 2023 CLIR Events. Sign up for the DLF Forum newsletter to hear news first.

 

Jennifer Ferretti, on behalf of Team DLF.