Bio

Dr. Janice Stewart is Senior Instructor and Chair, Critical Studies in Sexuality and Undergraduate Chair at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia. Dr. Stewart’s pedagogical leadership and scholarly priorities emerge from a deep commitment to educational excellence and the pursuit of effective and transformative pedagogical strategies. During their career at UBC, through their engagement in educational leadership, Dr. Stewart has made significant interdisciplinary contributions that create meaningful and enriched student learning opportunities and also, critically engage with social justice issues. Dr. Janice Stewart contributes extensively to the development of teaching practices that prioritize multimodal literacies and technologically-supported knowledge production as well as intercultural understanding and social sustainability.

Project

The Serious Play: Critical Engagements with Game Culture project explores the integration of gaming as a pedagogical tool into undergraduate learning environments. This project directly tackles problems of persistent inequality that plague citizenship and climate in multiuser gaming communities. Feminist analyses of technology consistently argue that official knowledge is mapped in ways that typically exclude members of marginalized groups and represents a very partial aggregate of culture. Participatory technologies intended to enable active relationships to public knowledge and new forms of educational innovation and participatory citizenship require careful attention so as to not reproduce conditions of systemic inequality. Accordingly, this project locates games as undergraduate teaching  tools that explicitly educate students to be able to read and write across multiple cultural texts in a critical manner that builds capacities.