On May 11th I will join three other speakers on a panel about gaming, identity, and law organized by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
The panel is part of a pre-university masterclass for highschool students that focuses on the theme, Digital Lives. The masterclass requires the students to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on “virtual gaming worlds” and prepare questions and discussion contributions for the panel discussion. The panelists will kick off the discussion by introducing students to questions of identity formation and legal limitation from various business and academic perspectives on gaming. The initiative sounds like a great way to get young people interested in social sciences and ethnographic methods through engaging them in active fieldwork and interdisciplinary discussion about digital media!
I’ll be joining Roxanne Mollekramer (senior manager at MMOGames.com), Arno Lodder (Prof. of Law, VU) and René Glas (Prof. of New Media, Utrecht). The short talk I’m preparing is inspired by anthropological approaches to understanding identity construction processes on digital gaming platforms, such as the work of Prof. Tom Boellstorff.
Donya Alinejad 