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DiGRA: Candidate for Executive Board - Bart Simon
2009-08-18 20:26 | Posted by jpzagal | Permanent Link | Association NewsAn election of the new executive board of DiGRA will take place at the Association's AGM held at DIGRA 2009 on 02/09/09 at 7.00pm at Brunel University, Uxbirdge UK. The new board has the important role of assuring that DiGRA contines to flourish and that it is best equipped to serve its members. We will be posting the applications received on this website in the order that they're received. Our intention is to help DiGRA members meet the candidates and learn of their plans and vision for the association.
The following is Bart Simon's application:
Here's my little blurb in support of myself for an open seat position on the DiGRA executive board. I've been involved in DiGRA since the beginning and happily served as part of the original Games Research Association working group developing what became the early agenda for DiGRA. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and I am the director of the cross-faculty research initiative on Technoculture, Art and Games (http://www.tag.hexagram.ca). I was a member of the conference review subcommittee for DiGRA and served as the review chair for the games and culture streams for the DiGRA conferences in 2007 and 2009. I'm on the editorial boards of /Games and Culture/, /Game Studies/ and /Loading.../ My research areas kind of cover the gamut from MMOs through LAN parties and most recently gestural platforms like the Wii.... no, no, honestly... I like the Wii.
My main reason for running for the executive board is that I have been helping to write a $#^-load of large scale research grants this past year so my pro-game studies rhetoric is really at its peak and I become more of a believer each and every day (grant writing tends to have that effect). In terms of administrative agenda items for me to champion within DiGRA... I think i'd like to renew efforts at finding ways to build infrastructures and resources for greater international research collaboration, help to encourage student exchanges and networking, and seek to maintain DiGRA as a critically reflexive, integrative and open platform for gamey folks to meet and maybe unsettle each other a bit.