<div dir="ltr"><font face="times new roman, serif">Dear All, </font><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif">We hope this email finds you well. We would like to invite you all to the talk titled &quot;Apocalyptic Games: Radioactive Masculinity and Cold War Ludic Cultures&quot; 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. </font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif">Link to the facebook event :</font></div><a href="https://fb.me/e/2YVa9uq5z">https://fb.me/e/2YVa9uq5z</a><div><br></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif">We look forward to your participation. </font><br><div><br></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><b style=""><span lang="EN-US" style=""><font face="times new roman, serif" style="">Apocalyptic Games: Radioactive Masculinity and Cold War Ludic Cultures</font></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="times new roman, serif"> </font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><font face="times new roman, serif"><span lang="EN-US">Escalating global animosity amongst Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) in the last decade along with nuclear disasters such as the Fukushima Daiichi Accident forced the <i>Bulletin of Atomic Scientists</i> to note in 2021: that it is only 100 seconds to midnight on the </span><a href="https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(5,99,193)"><span lang="EN-US">Doomsday Clock</span></a><span lang="EN-US">. Such apocalyptic predictions have only been exacerbated during the pandemic year with the <i>Science and Security Board</i> pointing out how “[N]uclear nations...have ignored or undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks.<span class="gmail_default" style="">&quot; </span>Promisingly, counter cultural tropes against nuclear proliferation have emerged in digital spaces such as the </span><a href="https://www.youth-fusion.org/nuclear-games/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(5,99,193)"><span lang="EN-US">Nuclear Games Project</span></a><span lang="EN-US"> that narrativizes through games and educational content &quot;the risks and human impact of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy&quot; (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.</span></font><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">Consequently, in this talk I argue through a historical contextualization of American board games from the Cold War era how </span><i style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">radioactive masculinity</i><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">—a form of hegemonic militarized masculinity contingent on the racialized and gendered bomb (</span><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02759527.2016.11978318" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">Roy 2016</a><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">, </span><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1487796?journalCode=riij20" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">2018</a><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">, </span><a href="https://www.aisna.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/4-Roy.pdf" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">2020</a><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">)—was operationalized as a heuristic to proliferate containment ideologies</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:garamond,&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">, which</span><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif"> were central to American realpolitik between 1945-1991. By focusing on apparently quotidian games such as </span><i style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">Scrabble, Chess, Risk </i><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">and </span><i style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">Clue</i><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">, 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</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">: </span><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">to sustain the nuclear infrastructures, imaginaries, and legacies of a bipolar world.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><font face="times new roman, serif"> </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><font face="times new roman, serif"> </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><u><font face="times new roman, serif">Speaker Bio:</font></u></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><font face="times new roman, serif" style=""><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy (Dibya) is an accomplished scholar and educator with over a decade&#39;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 <b><i>Health Promotion International, Gender, Place and Culture, Feminist Media Studies, Interventions, South Asian Review </i></b>and the<i> <b>Journal of Gaming and Virtual World</b>s</i>, to name a few.</span> <span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">He is also the founding member of India&#39;s first DH collective,  the Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (<a href="https://dhdharti.in/home/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(5,99,193)">DHARTI</a>) and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur, with joint appointments </span><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the School of Management and Entrepreneurship and the Division of Digital Humanities (</span><a href="https://iitj.ac.in/dh/index.php?id=people" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color:rgb(5,99,193)"><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">India&#39;s first Masters and PhD program in Digital Humanities</span></a><span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">).                            </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">Best wishes, </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm"><span style="font-family:&quot;times new roman&quot;,serif">DiGRA India Team                                                                                                                                                                           </span></p></div></div></div>