Playing Oppression
Playing Oppression

Author: Mary Flanagan

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0262047918

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A striking analysis of popular board games’ roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it. Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism. Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire’s distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century “trading games” that fêted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games’ most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. An essential addition to any player’s bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.

Algorithms of Oppression
Algorithms of Oppression

Author: Safiya Umoja Noble

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2018-02-20

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1479837245

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Acknowledgments -- Introduction: the power of algorithms -- A society, searching -- Searching for Black girls -- Searching for people and communities -- Searching for protections from search engines -- The future of knowledge in the public -- The future of information culture -- Conclusion: algorithms of oppression -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author

Woke Gaming
Woke Gaming

Author: Kishonna L. Gray

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0295744197

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From #Gamergate to the 2016 election, to the daily experiences of marginalized perspectives, gaming is entangled with mainstream cultures of systematic exploitation and oppression. Whether visible in the persistent color line that shapes the production, dissemination, and legitimization of dominant stereotypes within the industry itself, or in the dehumanizing representations often found within game spaces, many video games perpetuate injustice and mirror the inequities and violence that permeate society as a whole. Drawing from groundbreaking research on counter and oppositional gaming and from popular games such as World of Warcraft and Tomb Raider, Woke Gaming examines resistance to problematic spaces of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions in gaming culture. The contributors of these essays seek to identify strategies to detox gaming culture and orient players and gamers toward progressive ends. From Anna Anthropy’s Keep Me Occupied to Momo Pixel’s Hair Nah, video games can reveal the power and potential for marginalized communities to resist, and otherwise challenge dehumanizing representations inside and outside of game spaces. In a moment of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and efforts to transform current political realities, Woke Gaming illustrates the power and potential of video games to foster change and become a catalyst for social justice.

A Little Piece of Ground
A Little Piece of Ground

Author: Elizabeth Laird

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2016-02-01

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1608465837

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A Little Piece Of Ground will help young readers understand more about one of the worst conflicts afflicting our world today. Written by Elizabeth Laird, one of Great Britain’s best-known young adult authors, A Little Piece Of Ground explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy. Twelve-year-old Karim Aboudi and his family are trapped in their Ramallah home by a strict curfew. In response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, the Israeli military subjects the West Bank town to a virtual siege. Meanwhile, Karim, trapped at home with his teenage brother and fearful parents, longs to play football with his friends. When the curfew ends, he and his friend discover an unused patch of ground that’s the perfect site for a football pitch. Nearby, an old car hidden intact under bulldozed building makes a brilliant den. But in this city there’s constant danger, even for schoolboys. And when Israeli soldiers find Karim outside during the next curfew, it seems impossible that he will survive. This powerful book fills a substantial gap in existing young adult literature on the Middle East. With 23,000 copies already sold in the United Kingdom and Canada, this book is sure to find a wide audience among young adult readers in the United States.

Play like a Feminist.
Play like a Feminist.

Author: Shira Chess

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0262360446

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An important new voice provides a riveting look at why video games need feminism and why all of us should make space for more play in our lives. "You play like a girl": it's meant to be an insult, accusing a player of subpar, un-fun playing. If you're a girl, and you grow up, do you "play like a woman"--whatever that means? In this provocative and enlightening book, Shira Chess urges us to play like feminists. Furthermore, she urges us to play video games like feminists. Playing like a feminist is empowering and disruptive; it exceeds the boundaries of gender yet still advocates for gender equality. Feminism need video games as much as video games need feminism.

Playing it Queer
Playing it Queer

Author: Jodie Taylor

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 3034305532

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Popular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative capacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arousing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent to scholarly rigour, Playing it Queer provides an original and compelling ethnographic account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cultural world-making. This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant literatures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and creative practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club cultures, the author's rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in everyday queer lives.

Thriving in the Fight
Thriving in the Fight

Author: Denise Padín Collazo

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Published: 2021-02-23

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1523092521

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Social justice work is more crucial than ever, but it can be physically and emotionally draining. Longtime activist Denise Collazo offers three keys to help Hispanic women keep their focus, morale, and energy high. Winner of the gold medal at the International Latino Book Awards for Best Latina-Themed Book and Best Self-Transformational Book! Doing the work of social change is hard. Waking up every day to take on the biggest challenges of our time can be overwhelming, and sometimes progress is hard to see. She understands that Latina and all women of color activists do their best work when they are thriving, not simply surviving. Denise Padín Collazo has been there. She is the first Latina, the first woman of color, and the first woman period to raise a family and stay in the work of community organizing at Faith in Action, an international progressive network of 3,000 congregations and 2 million members. Drawing on her own experiences of triumph and failure, and those of other Latina activists, Collazo lays out three keys to thriving in the movement for social change: leading into your vision, living into the fullest version of yourself, and loving past negatives that hold you back. She also warns about the three signs that you may be surrendering: wishing for a future reality to emerge, wondering where your limits are, and waiting for permission and answers to come from others. Using this framework, Collazo offers wise and compassionate advice on some of the most important leadership challenges facing Latina activists. She explains how you can integrate family and work, step out of the background and claim your leadership potential, confront anti-Blackness in your own culture, keep focused on your ultimate purpose, and raise the necessary resources to keep fighting for justice. This honest, practical, and inspirational book will help Latina activists to burn bright, not burn out.

Detransition, Baby
Detransition, Baby

Author: Torrey Peters

Publisher: One World

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0593133374

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires in “one of the most celebrated novels of the year” (Time) “Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”—Vulture One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the Best Books of the Year by more than twenty publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, and Autostraddle PEN/Hemingway Award Winner • Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gotham Book Prize • Longlisted for The Women’s Prize • Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • New York Times Editors’ Choice Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men. Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together? This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.

Trends in Contemporary Assamese Theatre
Trends in Contemporary Assamese Theatre

Author: Namrata Pathak

Publisher: Partridge Publishing

Published: 2015-03-27

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1482846543

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It is the very nature of representation to be theatrical and self-referential. This book undercuts the fact that all representational knowledge is autonomous and sovereign. At times, theatrical representations can misguide and mislead. Representation can also ineluctably project ones own preferences and preoccupations. Thus, representation and subjective interpretation divulge into myriad domains. This book is concerned with the effects and consequences of representation and its politics. This book examines not only how language as well as representation produce meaning, but also how discursive knowledge connected to power regulates, conducts, and constructs identities and defines the way certain things are thought about practices and are studied. The book takes note of the fact that within the framework of performance, a performative subject does not wear a coherent identity as it is fragmented, decentered, simulated and is unstable, while being both virtual as well as actual. In the field of semiotics, theatre is historically and reciprocally affected by practice, especially within contingent conditions of time. In theatre semiotics, the new image of knowledge is that of turbulence. Here, knowledge is not so much a system as it is a confluence. Carrying this stance further we can say that contemporary Assamese theatre is characterised by shifting counter-voices and sub-textual underpinnings. This act forces reading into two directions: dialogic openness and variability of meaning that question the theatre directors as the only ones who know.