My talk on phases of cultural scenes is up at the Critical Proximity website.
I wrote the talk too long and had to cut it way down, which left it a little disjointed. There’s a bit in the beginning about academia that seems to not connect to things later in the talk. Originally there was more toward the end comparing academic departments to scenes that have seen increasing amounts of fragmentation and specialization. I meant to ask whether this is the fate of games criticism as well. The question becomes more complicated in the wake of a fervor for interdisciplinary research that everyone seems to want, but few seem to want to fund.
Several of the other talks in the track were relevant to mine in interesting and intersectional ways. See especially:
- Communities or Island Nations? by Samantha Allen
- Fracturing Monoculture with Non-traditional Community Models by Harry Lee
- Games Writing and Academic Institutional Authority by Gaines Hubbell
These are just a few that felt particularly relevant to my talk, but the entire conference was stellar and the talks got more and more powerful throughout the day.
