Recently, my colleague Dr Michele Jarldorn and I were lucky enough to write a chapter for the wonderful book Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education edited by Ameilia Walker, Helen Grimmett and Alison L. Black.
There are so many amazing chapters in this book, written by so many cool people and discussing games’ interactions with social power, and the different ways in which games and play impact higher education and social learning.
Our chapter was titled Cards Against Academia: Playing the game of ‘opportunities’ through a feminist friendship lens and for this chapter we created the first iteration of a card game exploring promotion in academia, and playtested it together. The abstract is below:
Abstract:
This chapter explores the experiences of two early career female academics through game design, development, and game play. The work seeks to challenge and disrupt the conventional norms of academia by exploring the competitive dynamics of working in higher education through the lens of care and feminist friendships. The game, Cards Against Academia, deploys various game design mechanisms to demonstrate structures of inequality and systems of oppression women in academia experience. The chapter uses duoethnography as a method to think through alternative activist possibilities for women to work in collaboration and proposes that this feminist activism of care is a politically disruptive activity.