[India] Apocalyptic Games: Radioactive Masculinity and Cold War Ludic Cultures - Talk on Oct 9, 2021

[DiGRA India]

Dear All,

We hope this email finds you well. We would like to invite you all to the
talk titled "Apocalyptic Games: Radioactive Masculinity and Cold War Ludic
Cultures" that will be delivered by Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy. The talk is
scheduled on October 9th , 2021 at 8:30 PM IST.We will be sharing the
meeting link very soon on our social media handles and even through email.

Link to the facebook event :
https://fb.me/e/2YVa9uq5z

We look forward to your participation.

*Apocalyptic Games: Radioactive Masculinity and Cold War Ludic Cultures*



Escalating global animosity amongst Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) in the
last decade along with nuclear disasters such as the Fukushima Daiichi
Accident forced the *Bulletin of Atomic Scientists* to note in 2021: that
it is only 100 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock
<https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/>. Such apocalyptic predictions
have only been exacerbated during the pandemic year with the *Science and
Security Board* pointing out how “[N]uclear nations...have ignored or
undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for
managing nuclear risks." Promisingly, counter cultural tropes against
nuclear proliferation have emerged in digital spaces such as the Nuclear
Games Project <https://www.youth-fusion.org/nuclear-games/> that
narrativizes through games and educational content "the risks and human
impact of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy" (Youth Fusion 2020).However,
there is still a considerable dearth of critical scholarship in Game
Studies regarding how Cold War Gaming Cultures—emerging from a dominant
literacy of nuclear—continue to shape our contemporary online and offline
gaming practices.Consequently, in this talk I argue through a historical
contextualization of American board games from the Cold War era how
*radioactive
masculinity*—a form of hegemonic militarized masculinity contingent on the
racialized and gendered bomb (Roy 2016
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02759527.2016.11978318>, 2018
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1487796?journalCode=riij20>
, 2020 <https://www.aisna.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/4-Roy.pdf>)—was
operationalized as a heuristic to proliferate containment ideologies,
which were
central to American realpolitik between 1945-1991. By focusing on
apparently quotidian games such as *Scrabble, Chess, Risk *and *Clue*, to
only name a few, I examine how these games became proxy battlefields
through which the anxieties and ideological struggles of Cold War America
were simultaneously materialized in domestic spaces and transferred beyond: to
sustain the nuclear infrastructures, imaginaries, and legacies of a bipolar
world.





*Speaker Bio:*

Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy (Dibya) is an accomplished scholar and educator with
over a decade's experience working in multidisciplinary academic
environments across USA, UK, and India. His public facing research profile
is transdisciplinary with specializations in New Media and Digital
Humanities, Global South Masculinities, and Postcolonial Science and
Technology Studies. His published work can be found in prestigious venues
such as *Health Promotion International, Gender, Place and Culture,
Feminist Media Studies, Interventions, South Asian Review *and the* Journal
of Gaming and Virtual Worlds*, to name a few. He is also the founding
member of India's first DH collective,  the Digital Humanities Alliance for
Research and Teaching Innovations (DHARTI <https://dhdharti.in/home/>) and
is currently an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology
(IIT) Jodhpur, with joint appointments School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, the School of Management and Entrepreneurship and the Division of
Digital Humanities (India's first Masters and PhD program in Digital
Humanities <https://iitj.ac.in/dh/index.php?id=people>).


Best wishes,

DiGRA India Team
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