The Games & Culture Humanities Lab is part of a multi-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Unbounded initiative at Duke University. Led by faculty in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) and beyond, our lab fosters interdisciplinary and vertically-integrated collaborations among faculty, graduate and undergraduate students across the university and the broader community. Lab participants explore games and gaming throughout history and in contemporary society, from local to global contexts.
What is the wide-ranging impact of the multi-billion-dollar gaming industry in our societies today? How might this powerful resource be harnessed beyond entertainment for broader social, civic, and cultural engagement? How might we use games as an innovative pedagogical, learning, and design tool to enhance our teaching and engagement in our classrooms and in the wider community? We invite games aficionados and novices alike from across fields and disciplines to drop by to check out our programs and events throughout the year to start conversations and to explore creative ways to do more with games as an ever-expanding expressive medium in our world.
To learn more, please e-mail us at gamesandculture@duke.edu or visit us in the Game Lab (Perkins Library Link Classroom 6). View directions.
Gaming and Society
Focuses on the gaming industry and its social relations.
Faculty:
Nayoung Aimee Kwon (na.kwon@duke.edu)
Courses:
- Archiving and Visualizing Asia
- Techno-Orientalism (co-taught with Lisa Nakamura, Director of Digital Studies Institute at University of Michigan)
- The World of Gaming
Game Design
Students explore ways to engage game design and development to address broader social concerns.
Faculty:
Leo Ching (lching@duke.edu)
Shai Ginsburg (shai.ginsburg@duke.edu) (on leave Fall 2019)
Courses:
- AMES 495: Collaborative Research
- Games & Culture
Language Pedagogy and Games
Explores the possible uses of games as a pedagogical tool in foreign language education.
StoryLab
Explores connections between storytelling, narratives, and games.
Faculty:
Clare Woods (jcwoods@duke.edu)
Eileen Chow (eileen.chow@duke.edu)
Carlos Rojas (c.rojas@duke.edu)
To learn more, visit us here.
Opportunities at the Lab:
Monthly Game Nights
Community-building and fostering collaborative ideas.
Game Lab Fellows
Undergraduate and graduate students may propose projects related to games and gaming, from working and reading groups, game design sessions, building research and pedagogical tools, to independent and collaborative research topics.
Write-Together with StoryLab.
Join us for a weekly writing bootcamp.
Community Collaborations with the North Carolina Museum of Life and Sciences in Durham!
Summer Engagement with refugee and migrant youth @ Duke Engage Koreas
