shira chess
... media studies | gender studies | communication studies ...
I am a doctoral candidate getting my PhD in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I am currently searching for a tenure track position for the 2009-2010 school year.
My dissertation entitled, License to Play: Women, Productivity, and Video Games analyzes gender and digital gaming from a cultural perspective. With several different video games and gaming systems currently being aimed at feminine audiences, this emerging area of research is vital to understanding larger cultural attitudes towards gender, technology, leisure, and new media. To understand what is going on I analyze several video games, advertising campaigns, video game reviews and blogs all relating to femininity and play. In the next few years, I hope to continue my current line of research and to extend it to include other factors such as race and class. Ultimately, I hope to have more hands-on opportunities to observe play patterns of women (using institutional ethnography approaches) and I plan to apply for research grants to fund this research.