Dr. Astrid Ensslin, Principal Investigator, University of Alberta
Dr. Ensslin is a Professor in Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta and divides her teaching and research activities between the Departments of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies / Digital Humanities. She leads the Faculty of Arts' "Digital Synergies" signature area of research and creative collaboration and is Director of Media Studies (BA Major launching in 2020). Her main publications include Approaches to Videogame Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2019), Small Screen Fictions (Paradoxa, 2017), Literary Gaming (MIT Press, 2014), Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2013), The Language of Gaming (Palgrave, 2011), Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (Routledge, 2011), Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (Bloomsbury, 2007), and Language in the Media: Representations, Identity, Ideology (Bloomsbury, 2007). She is Director of the Electronic Literature Organization and the Electronic Literature Directory, as well as Principal Editor of the Bloomsbury "Electronic Literature" book series and C.U.P.'s Elements "Digital Fictions" minigraph series. a Review Board member of Game Studies, and an Editorial Board member of Discourse, Context & Media (Elsevier). She has led externally funded research projects on videogames across cultures, reading and analyzing digital fiction, and specialized language corpora.
Dr. Carla Rice, Co-investigator, University of Guelph
Carla Rice is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph. She is the founder of the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice, a community-engaged research creation centre with a mandate to use arts-informed methods to foster inclusive communities, well-being, equity, and justice within Canada and beyond. Her current research program investigates the power of story to creatively re-imagine the human, including through decolonizing education, speaking back to ableism and weightism in healthcare, experimenting with/enacting accessible practices in material and virtual spaces, and cultivating non-normative arts in Canada.
Dr. Sarah Riley, Collaborator, Prifysgol Aberystwyth University
Sarah Riley is a Reader/Associate Professor in Critical Psychology at Aberystwyth University, UK and lead for the Centre for Critical Psychology there. Her research uses qualitative methods to explore the psychological impact of neoliberalism, addressing questions of gender, embodiment, health, youth culture and citizenship. Her co-authored books include Critical Bodies (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2008), Doing Your Qualitative Research Project (Sage, 2012), Technologies of Sexiness: Sex, Identity and Consumer Culture (Oxford University Press, USA, 2014), Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018) and Postfeminism and Body Image (Routledge, forthcoming). She is the current chair of the British Psychology Section ‘Qualitative Methods in Psychology’. Twitter: @sarahrileybrown
Christine Wilks, Post-Doctoral Fellow & Digital Fiction Designer, Bath Spa University
Christine Wilks is a digital writer, artist and developer of interactive narratives and playable media. Her digital fiction, Underbelly, won the New Media Writing Prize 2010 and the MaMSIE Digital Media Competition 2011. Her work is published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, including the 'Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2' and the ‘ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature’, and has been presented internationally at festivals, exhibitions and conferences. From 2007 to 2013 she was a core member of the digital arts remixing collective, R3M1XW0RX, and contributed over 100 remixes. Before working in digital media and the web, she made short films, videos, animations, installations and wrote fiction and screenplays. She has an MA in Fine Art from Cardiff Institute of Higher Education (UWIC) and an MA(Hons) in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University. She is currently creating an interactive digital narrative, a psychological thriller for mobile devices, as part of her practice-based PhD in Digital Writing at Bath Spa University.
Hannah Fowlie, Research Assistant, University of Guelph
Hannah Fowlie is a non-Indigenous woman who, as the social worker at the Toronto District School Board’s Aboriginal Education Centre (AEC), has worked, side-by-side with her First Nations, Métis, Inuit colleagues for nine years. In 2012, she received an invitation to join a storytelling project entitled, inVISIBILITY: indigenous in the city with Dr. Susan Dion (Lenape/Pottawami), a professor at York University and Dr. Carla Rice, Research Chair and Founder of Revision Centre at Guelph University, and since that time has been involved, with the Re•Vision Centre, in several digital storytelling workshops with many different communities. Hannah has also had a lifetime love and involvement in the arts, as an actor, director and aspiring filmmaker. Hannah has also been working with and training with the Narrative Therapy Centre since 2007 and is enlivened by the relationship between narrative therapeutic practices and the digital storytelling.
Megan Perram, Research Assistant, University of Alberta
Megan Perram (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research centres the experiences of women and individuals with hyperandrogenism by exploring innovative digital tools for writing illness narratives. Megan’s professional experience includes interning in the office of the Provincial Minister of the Status of Women, working as Gender and Sexuality Historical Researcher for Fort Edmonton Park, and the role of Editorial Assistant for Transplantation Journal. Megan is currently Editor-in-Chief of Connections: A Journal of Language, Media and Culture.
Dr. Aly Bailey, Research Assistant, University of Guelph
Aly Bailey is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow working under the supervision of Dr. Carla Rice at the University of Guelph. Her postdoctoral program of work is exploring embodiment experiences and yoga, titled, “Revisioning yoga and yoga bodies: Expanding modes of embodiment with non-normative bodies”. As a yoga instructor for the last few years she has observed and experienced the exclusionary system of the Western yoga industry. Most yoga studios, classes, and teacher training curriculums have been designed to serve heteronormative women who are white, thin, tall, hyperflexible, and in the middle and upper classes. To challenge the dominant stereotypes within yoga, Aly will co-design a decolonized and inclusive yoga curriculum with non-normatively embodied people – placing bodily differences at the center rather than at the margins.
Lauren Munro, Research Assistant, University of Guelph
Lauren Munro is a PhD candidate in the Community Psychology program at Wilfrid Laurier University whose personal and professional life is driven by a commitment to social justice. She is a fat activist, artist, and writer who strongly believes in the importance of integrating academia and grassroots activism to create projects that push boundaries and challenge the status quo. Lauren is a passionate educator and researcher who has been involved in a wide array of projects focused on the health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities, body diversity and weight stigma, disability justice in arts-based research, transformative approaches to mental health, sexual health service access for women with psychiatric disabilities, and issues related to sexual health and HIV vulnerability.
Natali Panic-Cidic, Research Intern, RWTH Aachen University
Natali Panic-Cidic is a passionate gamer, a scholar, and a Master student at the RWTH Aachen University. She has been researching games from multiple perspectives, including cognitive narrative sciences, meaning construction in video games through image schemas, and player-narrative interactions since 2013. Currently, she is working towards a PhD in Games User Research (GUR) and she is hoping to work within the video game industry to help create immersive video games. In 2019, she started working on her first board game inspired by her four feline friends.
Antonia Mann, Research Intern, Ludwig Maximilian University
Antonia Mann is a BA student in the Department of Communication Science and Political Science at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Her research centers gender related judgment of politicians in the press and gender dependent differences in pharmaceutical advertising in television commercials. Antonia’s professional experiences includes working for the Free University of Berlin on a research project regarding the tone of news coverage in media when reporting about refugees coming to Germany and multiple editorial working student positions. In her bachelor’s thesis she is focusing on the quality of Germany’s foreign reporting and the meta-analysis of existing scientific studies related to that topic.