| Title | Is It All Just Cultural Studies? |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | One Scholar’s Journey into Media and Game Studies |
| Contributor | Adrienne Shaw(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.27 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/historiographies-of-game-studies-what-it-has-been-what-it-could-be/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Adrienne Shaw |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2025-07-25 |
| Long abstract | In this essay, I explore how my particular experiences have shaped my identity as a communication and media studies scholar who specializes in LGBTQ+ game studies. As someone who entered graduate school in 2005, I was not among the early cohort of scholars making a case for games being a viable topic of study at all (several journals and professional organizations were already established around that time). But neither did I have access to any established notion of what “counts” as game studies. Over time, I found that like with communication and media studies, there are actually many versions of game studies, rather than one coherent field—and this is a good thing. Embracing goals of interdisciplinarity and drawing on the critical politics of cultural studies are the foundation of my media and game studies. |
| Page range | pp. 609–630 |
| Print length | 22 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Adrienne Shaw (she/her) is Associate Professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production and a graduate faculty member in the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication. Her book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) won the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association. She is a founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive (www.lgbtqgamearchive.com) and co-curated Rainbow Arcade, an exhibit of 30 years of LGBTQ video game history at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, Germany (2018–2019). In addition to the exhibit catalog, she has written for and co-edited three anthologies. She became a Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellow in 2018. She is a series editor for NYU Press’s Critical Cultural Communication series and on the editorial board of six academic journals.