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Aleena Chia is an ethnographer of gaming cultures. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She researches practices at the margins of the digital and analogue, and in the interstices of work and play. Her work addresses gaming's boundary work as structuring categories in post-Fordism, as achievement systems in player communities, and as moral calculations in the new economy. In addition to ethnographic and qualitative approaches, she uses media archaeology and critical discourse analysis to study marginal forms of media: artefacts such as neuro-wearables for lucid dreaming and practices such as digital minimalism in social media disconnection. Her goal across these projects is to politicize the emotional and spiritual undercurrents of instrumental rationality in digital media.
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Dr. Chia received her PhD in Communication and Culture from Indiana University Bloomington in 2017 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland's Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies in 2018. Her work has been supported by training from the School of Criticism and Theory, funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and an internship at Microsoft Research New England's Social Media Collective.
Aleena is available to advise graduate student projects in Game Studies, Ethnography of Media, Digital Labour, and Techno-spirituality. |
