16:30 - 18:00,
Wednesday 14 November, 2018
Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series
About
Despite a growing interest in the way the media and popular culture shape geopolitical identities and subjectivities, current scholarship has overlooked the spaces, practices and experiences in which geopolitical sensibilities are made meaningful in everyday life. Whilst previous scholarship considers popular consumption as an interpretative act, this paper considers the ludic –or playful– encounter of geopolitical consumption, noting the social, material, and spatial contexts in which popular geopolitics is encountered. In making this case the paper draws attention to military-themed videogames and in particular the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, as an important everyday cultural artefact that shapes popular understanding of geopolitics. Methodologically the paper draws on 32 interviews and the collection of video ethnographic data, to reveal the everyday happenings of playing virtual war. In doing so, the talk will explore more specifically the emergent socio-spatial and technological relations that are constitutive of everyday popular understandings of geopolitics.
The hashtag to use for tweeting about this event is #OXDEG
Data Dump to delete
Speakers
- Name: Dr Daniel Bos
- Affiliation: School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
- Role:
- URL: https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/dbos.html
- Bio: Daniel Bos is a Departmental Lecturer in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His research explores the relationship between popular culture, geopolitics and militarism. His doctoral thesis investigated the role military-themed videogames have in shaping popular understandings of geopolitics and military violence. His current research interests consider how videogames and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences are being designed and used for social and political change.