Diversity in speculative fiction

Diversity in Speculative Fiction – Loncon 3, 72nd World Science Fiction Convention. Thursday 14 to Monday 18 August 2014. London, UK.

http://academicloncon3.wordpress.com/

http://loncon3.org/

Draft of Dead Space paper

Here is a link to the most recent draft of the Dead Space paper as a PDF. It builds on the presentation given at the fiction seminar in March. It’s a work in progress…still.

(Update December – I’ve taken the draft down now as I need to rewrite the discussion and conclusion, finish it off and submit it somewhere. Efforts are slightly hampered by my ongoing genre glitch. I know it is ‘survival horror’ but I still always type ‘horror survival’…).

 

Here’s an extract from the paper:

Dead Space is software played on hardware that involves particular arrangements of the player’s body, and which assumes particular kinds of physical and perceptual capacities. Playing Dead Space involves physical sensations. It involves onscreen and off-screen bodies reacting to one another in the presence of technology. Dead Space features representations of bodies marked out as monstrous, deviant, scrambled, augmented and professional. It depicts ability as crucial to survival, and structures ability into the game as a condition of progression. It depicts technology in particular ways, and associates technology with ability, restoration and agency. It offers a rich arena for the analysis of representations of ability and disability. This suggests why digital games like Dead Space might be of interest to disability studies, and why cultural theories of disability are pertinent to the study of games.

FROG in Vienna

7^th Vienna Games Conference

Future and Reality of Gaming – FROG13

Friday 27 to Saturday 28 September 2013

Submission Deadline: 25 May 2013

Call for papers at : http://bupp.at/en/service-en/frog/frog-2013/