First Mondays Block 6: Samantha Blackmon

In January 2011, Samantha Blackmon co-founded the Not Your Mama’s Gamer (NYMGamer) site and bi-weekly podcast in order to provide a space that would bring scholarly endeavors in line with personal passion, a space that would combine feminist interrogation of games with the games community. Since its inception, NYMGamer has grown by leaps and bounds, expanding content as well as staff, adding features such as the Signal Boost that focuses on diverse voices, gaming livestreams, and multimodal content. NYMGamer’s slate of writers past and present features professors and writers and professionals from a variety of industries, but the focus is always the same: unpacking games from a feminist perspective and having a good time while they’re at it.

This lecture is part of the 2017-2018 FemStem Symposium, a collaboration between Professors Heidi R. Lewis in Feminist & Gender Studies and Andrea Bruder in Math and Computer Science. This symposium was designed to illustrate how the interdisciplinary study of power and inequity — along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, and other social, cultural, and political markers — necessitates pedagogical and scholarly collaboration among intellectuals in myriad fields within and outside of the academy, not just those that may be more obviously connected than others. Further, the complexity of community, nation, and world problems has increased the need to provide our students with an education (within and outside the classroom) that enables them to work collaboratively across multiple fields of study and to develop the habits of life-long learning. Along these lines, interdisciplinary programming, like teaching and scholarship, addresses this by drawing on the ideas and methods of multiple disciplines, extending knowledge beyond any single discipline-specific domain to create innovative, integrative, and transformative solutions.