Time: Saturday, 9th October, 8:30 p.m Indian Standard Time
Abstract:
Consequently, in this talk I argue through a historical contextualization of American board games from the Cold War era how radioactive masculinity—a form of hegemonic militarized masculinity contingent on the racialized and gendered bomb (Roy 2016, 2018, 2020)—was operationalized as a heuristic to proliferate containment ideologies, which were central to American realpolitik between 1945-1991. By focusing on apparently quotidian games such as Scrabble, Chess, Risk and Clue, to only name a few, I examine how these games became proxy battlefields through which the anxieties and ideological struggles of Cold War America were simultaneously materialized in domestic spaces and transferred beyond: to sustain the nuclear infrastructures, imaginaries, and legacies of a bipolar world.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy (Dibya) is an accomplished scholar and educator with over a decade’s experience working in multidisciplinary academic environments across USA, UK, and India. His public facing research profile is transciplinary with specializations in New Media and Digital Humanities, Global South Masculinities, and Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies. His published work can be found in prestigious venues such as Health Promotion International, Gender, Place and Culture, Feminist Media Studies, Interventions, South Asian Review and the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, to name a few. He is also the founding member of India’s first DH collective, the Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (DHARTI) and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur, with joint appointments School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the School of Management and Entrepreneurship and the Division of Digital Humanities (India’s first Masters and PhD program in Digital Humanities).
Digital Games Research Association, India 