Games Institute members Diana Moreno Ojeda, Tina Chan, and Dr. Jennifer Roberts-Smith were among the presenters at the first ever W3 REPRESENTS: A Research Symposium hosted at UWaterloo by Waterloo Women Wednesdays (W3). The Symposium was organized in order to provide women and non-binary identifying graduate students, faculty, staff, and postdoctoral students with the opportunity to share and engage with research from all disciplines across UWaterloo.
Diana Moreno Ojeda, Applied Linguistics and Communications PhD student, presented her paper, "Appraisal Strategies in Women's Public Speech". Her paper looked at the evaluations present in women's language, examining how such language patterns express values and character. Using the Appraisal Framework, Diana classified the use of Judgment, Affect & Appreciation in speech, to identify what these themes say about one's identity and sense of belonging.
Tina Chan is a Masters of Science candidate in the School of Public Health and Health Systems and her Master's thesis looks at the intersections of gamification and mental health. For the W3 Symposium, she shared her research design for feedback from the female and non-binary audience to perfect her upcoming study.
Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Associate Professor of Communication Arts and faculty member of the Games Institute, co-presented Session 6 "Learning to Practice: Intersectional Feminist Design Research in the qcollaborative" with fellow qcollaborative lab members, Shana MacDonald (Communication Arts, UWaterloo), and Brianna Wiens (York University). Roberts-Smith, MacDonald, and Wiens presented the mandate of their research Lab, qcollaborative, inspired by intersectional feminism. They discussed several of the lab members' current research efforts, including the SSHRC-funded “The Personal is Aesthetic”, which just launched its social media campaign; and Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (led by Kristina Llewellyn, Renison College, with Jennifer Roberts-Smith as a co-investigator).
To read more about the symposium and the other speakers, check out the program here [link].