'Game Changers' shortlisted for Reimagine Education Award

Professor of Game Science Sylvester Arnab from the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC), has been nominated to receive the ‘Science of Learning’ award, which is the largest global awards programme for teaching and learning, recognising cutting edge innovators in the world of educational technology. Professor Arnab’s research project; ‘GameChangers: Educators as agents of change through playful pedagogy’ has been shortlisted out of over 1100 applicants. The project focuses on the design and implementation of playful learning experiences and emphasises empathetic design, development and gamified interventions. 

Sylvester and the GameChangers team will now present the project at the Reimagine Education Conference which takes place in December 2021, over 2000 industry leaders, investors and innovators in the education space will be expected to attend.

The GameChangers research team, co-led by CPC and Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab, worked on a number of initiatives involving educators and learners in marginalised communities around the world, running programmes in Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam that are funded under the Newton Fund and the Global Challenges Research Fund.

Learn more about the GameChangers project and the Reimagine Education Awards.

Report on digital transformation in the NHS

The report is the result of a research project led by Dr. Michael Loizou in collaboration with the Institute of Coding at Coventry University. It focuses on the importance of technological development within the healthcare system and draws from interviews and literature reviews to detail improvement possibilities in fields such as digital transformation in the NHS, adaptation of already existing technologies and data analytics. Link to the full report and more info. 

A project that includes CPC Associate Professor Kevin Walker, Nine Earths had its simultaneous premiere at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, and the British Film Institute in London in November. Nine Earths explores the relationship between everyday events and humanity’s excessive demand for the Earth’s resources: up to nine earth’s worth every year, revealing global consumption patterns through the lens of climate justice.

Nine Earths (2021)

Virtual Reality Archive Learning: Teaching Skills Through Heritage and Technology

On the 8th of October, this international virtual event has celebrated the completion of the EU project ViRAL - Virtual Reality Archive Learning led by Professor Jacqueline Cawston. The sessions showcased the work of partner experts not only from Coventry University but also Austria, Croatia, and Portugal. The event covered practices such as the use of 360 Videos in learning, the use of VR in museums, AR in social media, VR in e-learning, an introduction to Virtual Inclusive Cultural Entrepreneurship and the impact of the ViRAL project on post industrial heritage in Austria and Portugal. More info on the project website.

Virtual Reality Archive Learning Handbook. This guide is designed to give you an overall view of how to use and implement the VIRAL methodologies into adult education through educational essays, case studies and key terms.

Postdigital Intimacies Network Events

Domestic | Private | Familial - 4

23rd of November: a series of events dedicated to exploring how intimate spaces are shaped by postdigital media culture and our means of knowing and feeling the domestic, private and familial through social media, film, television, physical culture, screen media arts and performance.

(Post)digital Data and Health

30th of November: Today, the body’s intimate functions, including sleep, sex, menstruation, pregnancy and giving birth, and our mental health and wellbeing, can be digitized. Relationalities are forged, new methodologies emerge, including those that document our more-than-human intimacies with technology.

Part of AHRC Postdigital Intimacies series.

Coventry Creates: Third space AI & SPACEX

Professor Mel Jordan and Dr. Kevin Walker have been selected to work with two Coventry based artists on discussing and developing repsonses to their ongoing research. Coventry Creates is funded by the Arts Council and is a unique collaboration of art and research across Coventry University and Warwick University. 

SPACEX: Led by Professor Mel Jordan, the SPACEX project explores how art, design and architecture can be used to help combat issues faced by cities, and enable empathetic and inclusive ways of living together. Professor Jordan will collaborate with Coventry artist Duncan Whitley who works with experimental film-making and sound, synthesising cinema, documentary and spatial sound art. 

Third Space AI was created by Coventry-based artist Edie Jo Murray based on the research of CPC Associate Professor Kevin Walker. Third Space AI is an interactive, non-linear web-based artwork, designed to create a unique, non-prescriptive journey where deeper meanings about AI, divination and prediction may be glimpsed. At moments the visitor becomes a part of the narrative via various means, and no two experiences are entirely the same. Exhibition Launch: 8 December Registration link

Midlands4Cities Open Call:
PhD Opportunities at CPC

The Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) will fund and train the next generation of highly skilled arts and humanities researchers through PhD scholarships. M4C open call scholarships provide studentship funding for 3.5 years and enhanced support for professional development training to successful doctoral candidates. The application closing date for the open call is 13 January 2022 (12 noon) 
Apply here

Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumumanities by Janneke Adema

In this book, Dr. Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project—not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age.

Living Books has been published in three versions, print, Open Access PDF on the MIT Direct Platform, and on PubPub (which allows direct commenting and versioning).  

Watch Dr. Adema's book talk with Kevin Wisniewski for Textshop Experiments.

Read Reimagining the past and future of academic books: interview with Janneke Adema, autor of Living Books on DARIAH Open. Open scholarly practies in the arts and humanities.

Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM): Annual Report - Year 2 (2020-2021) 

Authored by Janneka Adema and Tobias Steiner, this report is the second of three annual reports to be submitted to Arcadia - a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, by the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. During its second year, the project as further developed its work on collaborative research, open infrastructures, project management, and outreach.

For more information, read Open Access Books Workouts, episode 1. Interview with Janneke Adema.

Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors

This report explores how publishers and authors can promote, nurture, and facilitate interaction with openly available books. Open access (obviously) opens up scholarship, but it also offers scope to enhance interactions between books, scholars, publishers, resources, librarians, and of course readers. This might take the form of creating communities and conversations around books, of gathering comments and hyperlinks, or of enabling updating, remixing and reusing, translating, modifying, reviewing, versioning, and forking of existing books.

Congratulations to Dr. Adrienne Evans for receiving the nomination for the British Psychological Society 2021 Book Award for Academic monograph for Postfeminism and Health. Critical Psychology and Media Perspectives authored alongside Sarah Riley and Martine Robson.

Find out more about the award here.

Homegrown Heroes and New War Warriors: Post-9/11 Depictions of Warfare in Call of Duty (2021)

CPC’s Marcus Maloney coauthors this chapter with Scott Doidge from the Australian Catholic University. This chapter examines the military ‘first person shooter’ (FPS) video game franchise, Call of Duty. As the most profitable military FPS franchise of all time, Call of Duty is often examined as an example of the ‘military-entertainment complex’. In contrast, the chapter examines the various Call of Duty games as mythmaking, a reflection on anxieties that lie beneath the ideological superstructure.

More info on the edited book.

Special Issue Art and the Public Sphere Journal: 'Monumental Statues, History and Emancipation'

Professor Mel Jordan has edited this special issue alongside Dave Beech. They have also co-authored the opening article Toppling Statues, Affective Publics and Black Lives Matter. In it, they examine the extent to which the online and offline activities of the BLM movement – including the toppling of statues – charge social media with the capacity to act as a fully fledged public sphere. They conclude that the BLM movement exemplifies a mode of public participation that outstrips conventional thinking on the bourgeois public sphere and therefore can be taken as model for radically rethinking what a public sphere ought to be.

More about the Journal here.

A Place Like the Present speaks to Gary Hall about his book - The Uberfication of the University - five years since its publication. The conversation takes concepts discussed in the book, namely platform capitalism, affirmative disruption, and the artrepreneur, and reads them through the situation presently faced by arts education.

What is discussed, looking past Covid-19, is how the university as an entity as well as a group of interconnected people, might evolve. 
The interview addresses Creative Commons, open access and how these can aid those in pursuit of progressive education, whether as teachers or students, or both.

Listen to the interview.

Open Access version of The Uberfication of the University.

Coventry Cultural Theory seminar series: February - July 2022

Often defined by the term ‘auto-theory’, recent shifts in cultural theory have seen a move to self- reflexivity, creative and hybrid texts, the polemic and the memoir as a way to write theory into the fabrics of everyday life.  The aim of the Coventry Cultural Theory seminar series is to reflect on these changes...

All events will be held online.

Organising committee: Prof Angela McRobbie | Dr Lindsay Balflour | Prof Gary Hall | Dr Adrienne Evans.