Research projects that aim to develop deeper understanding of human interactions has earned national recognition for two University of Waterloo graduate students.
Vossen’s PhD dissertation in English examines how accessible games and gamer culture is to girls and women. Her Storytellers submission was about her vision for the First Person Scholar website, run by graduate students at the Games Institute. The site enables games studies scholars to publish their research in a way that is free, open access and written in a way that can be understood by those without a graduate degree.
“I entered the contest because I think there are a lot of very troublesome and problematic things in academia that we accept as an implicit part of our lives and culture,” Vossen says. “I wanted people to consider the implicit assumption that academic publishing ‘just works that way,’ and instead make them ask why it works that way.”
Story excerpted from Waterloo Stories