Here’s a list of some of the courses I have taught or will be teaching. If you want to see a syllabus for any of these, get in touch and I may send it to you!
Haptic Media: With social interactions becoming increasingly digital, many of us may feel “touch starved,” looking to mediated forms of intimacy and community. How can haptic technologies, haptic aesthetics, and uses of these in video games, virtual reality, digital-physical art installations, and even early moving pictures, communicate the many different aspects of tactility at a distance? How can we communicate felt experiences as forms of unique knowledge? Drawing from video game studies, humor and gimmicks, feminist film theory, and Black feminist thought, this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to questions of haptic media. Students will complete three packets of deliverables toward a single unified interactive design using haptic and feeling aesthetics, and present this work in a collaborative final showcase. The final aim of the course is an exhibition of student work presented either virtually or in person, and documented online.
Justice and Equity in Technology: This course prepares students to work for justice and equity in technology and society by facilitating conversations about the sometimes-oppressive history and impact of Computer Science, and uplifting voices that have historically been marginalized within the field. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze and discuss technology within its broader context, and be able to use the tools of Computer Science to subvert the unjust structures the field has inherited.
Electronic Media explores the development and effects of popular and mass media forms from the introduction of electricity to the digital age, from the new to the cyber to the haunted, from physical infrastructures to imagined identities, from affect and technologized bodies, to virtual reality immersion and the metaverse. Why do scholars trace the history of our current digital media forms all the way back to the electric lightbulb? What do world's fairs, arcades, radio, film, television, and social media all have in common as forms of entertainment and communication? This course surveys the field of media studies by studying the aesthetics, technologies, and politics of media arts, networks, and cultures. By analyzing familiar objects like web sites and video games, and encountering historical media forms from the telegraph to the first text-based virtual worlds, we'll develop our own methodological tools for becoming more critical users and creators.
Queerness and Games (Updated Edition) is an advanced seminar introducing students to the intersection of LGBTQ issues, queer theory, and video games, a growing area of interest for scholars, game developers, critics, and artists. Texts may range from foundational works by Mattie Brice, Bo Ruberg, and micha cárdenas, to new developments in queer and trans* game theory and practice from Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ryan Rose Aceae, and the Soft Chaos collective. Both an overview of a field in formation and an invitation to participate in the creation of this new area of critical theory and practice, this course asks students to familiarize themselves with games, books, and articles in the field, and to engage critically through game design and scholarly writing.
Digital Worldmaking applies principles of video game studies and game design to the study of computers as “tools for transformation,” challenging the fantasy of technology companies as progressive and utopian disrupters of a repressive status quo, while these companies' products often deepen and reinforce oppressive systems of rules such as racism, sexism, binary cis gender, colonialism, and capitalism. The first-year seminar program at Occidental College prepares students for their first-stage writing portfolio, and each first-year seminar requires students to complete 20 pages of polished, completed writing by the end of the course. Co-taught with Professor Sheldon Schiffer.
Critical Video Game Studies: a writing-intensive course offering a critical humanities approach to the study of video games, with special attention to issues of gender, race, labor, representation, and narrative in games and gaming culture. Students will learn to write detailed analyses of video games, learning vocabulary to describe and debate the definition of games and play, the formal properties of game rules and mechanics, issues of identity and embodiment, and questions of ethics and values in games, among other issues.
Small Screens: an advanced seminar exploring the theory and aesthetics of the small. It considers film, video, television, video games, and digital media within global distribution networks, and the changing meaning of media reception in the home. While television is often called “the small screen,” digital distribution finds TV, film, video, and games coexisting on the small screens of mobile devices, and the big, HD screens of home entertainment systems. Yet smallness persists in aesthetic modes of the everyday, toy, mobile, cute, viral, indie, trashy, and pirated. Students will explore smallness on screen through written responses, multimedia presentations, and media production projects.
Representing Sexuality and Gender on Screen: an advanced seminar exploring the relationship between censorship and self-expression, with a particular focus on queer and feminist readings of Hollywood cinema and the history of the adult film and video industry in the United States. Students will learn queer and feminist reading strategies, performative strategies of resistance, and artistic movements including the New Queer Cinema within the histories of regulation that shaped them, from the Motion Picture Production Code, to the ratings system, to SESTA-FOSTA.
Television and/as Popular Culture: An intermediate historical overview of television as part of the history of popular electronic media in the United States, from telegraphy, to radio, to broadcast TV, cable, satellite, and digital streaming platforms. Students write three papers dedicated to different periods in the history of television as popular culture using primary and secondary sources along with textual analysis of a television program of their choice.
TRANS/MEDIA: Transgender Studies and Trans(media) Narratives: advanced seminar which considers transgender experience and cultural production as central to the study of contemporary “transmedia” intertextual narratives. Characters and concepts from fiction may travel across both geographic and technological borders through what Marsha Kinder termed “transmedia intertextuality” (1991), being monetized as sliding signifiers through many media forms such as television, film, comic books, and toys. Henry Jenkins popularized the concept of “transmedia storytelling” in relation to what he called “convergence culture” (2006) in franchises and fandoms such as that which followed the release of The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999). Yet The Matrix, a key transmedia text, was in fact made by trans authors, and new work in trans studies and film studies such as Caél Keegan’s Lana and Lilly Wachowski (2018), which considers the auteurs in the context of their trans identities, demands attention to the work of trans media in transmedia. Read in this way, The Matrix series is one key example of how transmedia may have always already been transgender. By working as students of media studies with concepts from transgender studies alongside the study of transmedia, this course hopes to address this gap in the representation of trans subjects in digital media studies.
Queerness and Games Design Workshop: The Queerness and Games Design Workshop was a free program for all Berkeley undergraduates interested in learning to make video games as a mode of self-exploration and expression. Students collaborate in teams over the course of two months, workshop their games with industry professionals, and present their work at the annual Queerness and Games Conference.