Spring 2021 Updates

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

The start of the Spring term marked a full year into the Covid-19 pandemic from when the GI closed its doors. However, unlike last year where we were leading the charge in moving, adapting, and creating in(to) virtual environments, this year a new problem arose—the question of hybridization, accessibility, and the continued challenge of community building in virtual and real worlds. Check out some of the accomplishments our members achieved below!

At a Glance….

  1. Former GI M.A. Caroline Wong received a UXR job at Sunlife.
  2. Former GI Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Kevin Barton began working at Apocalypse Studios.
  3. Former GI Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Rita Orji won the CHCCS Graphics Interface Early Career Research award.
  4. Drs. Neil Randall and Michael Barnett-Cowan spoke to Lifewire about Vintage Games.
  5. PhD student Toben Racicot was highlighted in the Environments of Change (SSHRC PG, hosted by fellow UW D.R.A.G.E.N Lab) annual report for his outstanding work in developing an analogue board game inspired by the historical environment of late medieval Sussex and the Battle Abbey.
  6. Dr. Lennart Nacke won IJHCS best research paper of 2020 entitled “Development and validation of the player experience inventory: a Scale to measure player experiences at the level of functional and psychosocial consequences” and also became one of the top ten 2021 AI 2000. Most Influential Scholars in Human-Computer Interaction.
  7. Dr. Randy Harris, and the Rhetoricon Database group (who are building a citizen science game for harvesting rhetorical figures), received an Honourable Mention in the Research category for the Cooperative and Experiential Education Employer Impact Awards.

New Grants

  1. Dr. Oliver Schneider was awarded a NFRF Exploration Grant.
  2. Dr. Shana MacDonald, received:
    1. SSHRC Insight Grant titled Feminist Digital Media (2016-2020): Building Affective and Activist Worlds.
    2. Archives Unleashed Cohorts Program 2021 - June 2022 Everything Old is New Again: A Comparative Analysis of Feminist Media Tactics between the 2nd to 4th Waves.
    1. Co-Investigator, NSERC Encouraging Vaccine Confidence in Canada Grant titled Connect, Collaborate, and Tailor: Multimedia tools to Promote Vaccine Confidence.
  3. Dr. Lennart Nacke received a CIHR Grant titled Exergetic project; hosted at the UW Stratford School of Interactive Design

New Publications

  1. Lei, S., Guo, Z., Tan, X., Chen, X., Li, C., Zou, J., Cao, S., & Feng, G. (2021). Cognitive abilities predict safety performance: A study examining High-Speed Railway dispatchers. Journal of Advanced Transportation
  1. Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context 3rd ed., editors Paul Long, Shana MacDonald et al. (Routledge, forthcoming) June 21, 2021.
  2. #SelfCareisforWhiteWomen: Moving from an Ostentatious Politics of ‘Self-Care’ towards Intersectional Feminist Politics,” co-authored by Dr. Shana MacDonald and Dr. Brianna I. Wiens, NECSUS: European Journal of Media (June 2021).
  3.  “Not Influencers, but Amplifiers: @aesthetic.resistance as Feminist IG Hack” in Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook, edited by Hanna Jacobs and Beth Fischer (Duke UP, 2021).
  4. Prototyping Across the Disciplines: Designing Better Futures, edited by Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Stan Ruecker, and Milena Radzikowska .