Game Cultures cluster at BDiGRA this weekend

The BCMCR Game Cultures cluster will have a strong presence at this year’s British DiGRA conference, held at Staffordshire University London on 12-13 April 2024. The conference title is The In-Betweenness of Play, and is a hybrid joint conference with DiGRA Brasil. With representation from staff, BCU PGRs, and one visiting PGR who we are shamelessly claiming as our own, this means the cluster will be represented across five panels and seven presentations. Should anyone like to join online or in person (via the email address in the CFP, linked above), note that the conference is timed so that attendees in both the UK and Brazil can meet at a reasonable time of day, making a slightly later start for those of us heading to London to present.

The range of panel themes with BCU presence shows the range of topics and interests across the cluster. On the 12th, the Posthumamisn and Futurism panel will have individual presentations from Poppy Wilde, Reuben Mount, and Antonio Greff de Freitas; later that afternoon Harrison Charles and cluster co-lead Charlotte Stevens will give a joint presentation for the Adaptation and Performance panel. On the 13th, Harrison Charles will have his own solo presentation on the Queerness and Research panel, followed by Maria O’Brien (at the University of Galway, sadly not a cluster member) and cluster co-lead Nick Webber on the Cultural Policy and Decolonization panel. Finally, the Ecology and Environmentalism panel will see Will McKeown presenting, alongside a presentation given by friends of the cluster, Marcelo Simão de Vasconcellos and Flavia Garcia Carvalho, who are based in Brazil (and much as we’d like, we can’t claim them as part of our cluster).

It is relatively unusual for so many members of one research group to appear at the same conference, particularly when these were submitted as independent presentations, rather than panel proposals. We are fortunate in the cluster that we have a comparatively sizeable and robust community of games research at BCU, and that the Game Cultures cluster continues to support researchers at a broad range of career stages with their work.

On behalf of the cluster, our thanks to the BDiGRA conference committee for putting together a great programme!