[India] Reminder: Talk by Dr Dibyadyuti Roy on October 9, 2021

[DiGRA India]

Dear All,

Hello Everyone! Please join us for the talk, “Apocalyptic Games:
Radioactive Masculinity and Cold War Ludic Cultures” that will be delivered
by Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy on October 9th, 2021 at 8:30 PM IST.

Meeting Link : http://meet.google.com/tdq-bchz-bhm

Facebook Event Link: https://fb.me/e/2KhCxe0uq


Abstract:
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. 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 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, 2018, 2020)—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.


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) 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).

We look forward to your participation!


Best wishes,
DiGRA India Team
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