Teaching

Reading, making and playing.

I teach digital culture through literature, film, games and creative practice. Students investigate how technologies shape everyday life, and explore those questions by making things themselves.

Curriculum design

Modules I have developed and convened.

These four modules are part of a wider teaching practice across undergraduate and postgraduate study. Interactivity grew through three years of development with colleagues in Drama and Theatre Arts, Film and Creative Writing.

The descriptions and selections below draw on my teaching materials across different years. They give a flavour of each module, rather than a current syllabus or list of modules available to enrol on.

Our Digital World

Digital cultures, past and present

How do fiction, film, games and software shape the digital worlds we inhabit? This module connects close reading with questions about AI, inequality, identity and the environmental costs of technology.

Module description

How can we make sense of our digital present? What led us here? And what will the future of digital culture look like across the globe? Our Digital World invites you to think about past, present and future versions of digital cultures in everyday life, print, and on screen. We will explore the role played by authors, theorists, filmmakers, and videogame developers, alongside social media companies, artificial intelligence, and software developers, in co-creating the media landscape we live within.

This module will introduce you to the ways you might read and critique the digital world around you: from interactive storytelling to social media, and consider big global issues, from the impacts of AI to the environmental impact of big tech. We will also address how digital culture impacts people differently around the world. This includes an exploration of the interplay between the digital world and topics such as race, gender, social and economic inequality, disability, and other real-world societal factors.

This module provides a range of skills and experiences to enable you to understand and critique our increasingly digital world.

No technical expertise or prior experience with digital texts, such as videogames, is required.

Selected reading and creative works

NovelHari Kunzru
Transmission
NovelNeal Stephenson
Snow Crash
EssayKara Keeling
Queer OS
EssayKim Gallon
Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities

Interactivity

The Theory and Practice of Getting Stuck In

Students study interactive fiction, games, theatre and playable nonfiction, then make interactive work of their own. Practical workshops, including work with Twine, connect critical ideas with the choices involved in creating an experience.

Module description

This module asks students to get stuck in. Students will explore a variety of media including books, films, non-fiction, theatre, roleplaying, and games that require their readers and players to shape the meaning of each text through active engagement.

Students will study a range of interactive texts, a variety of theories and contexts with which to understand them, and learn how to make interactive texts themselves across a range of mediums. The kinds of texts studied might include the videogames of Sam Barlow, interactive fiction of Anna Anthropy, playable documentaries such as Out For Delivery, and creative journalism such as Amira Hanafi’s “A dictionary of the revolution.” In addition, students will take part in practical workshops and learn the skills needed to create their own interactive experiences, which will inform their academic understanding of these wide-ranging forms. Students will be taught how to use a range of simple software, such as Twine, an easy to use open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. These sessions will culminate in the creation of a portfolio project for assessment, which will include a piece of interactive content, such as a non-linear short story, an interactive short film, a piece of theatre, videogame, boardgame, playable nonfiction, or other kinds of content related to a particular week of the module.

Selected reading and creative works

Practical guideAidan Doyle
Writer’s Guide to Twine
BookG. White
Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation
BookRose Biggin
Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk
Interactive workAmira Hanafi
A Dictionary of the Revolution

Digital Futures

Imagining technology and its possibilities

What did earlier generations imagine digital life would be like? Literature, film, art and games provide ways to explore technological hopes and fears, from cyborg feminisms and Afrofuturism to disability, artificial intelligence and work.

Module description

How did people feel about digital technologies, before they became part of daily life? Are we living in the kind of future imagined by previous generations? And what might happen in the next hundred years? This module invites you to think about past, present and future versions of digital cultures in print and on screen, exploring the role played by authors, artists, theorists and filmmakers in developing the kinds of media privileged societies take for granted now.

We will look back to how writers in earlier eras anticipated technological innovations in politics, work and leisure – some thrilled and some horrified by what they foresaw – and compare these with twenty-first century responses to phenomena such as social media, virtual reality, cyborg subjectivities, and global communications.

The module will introduce key texts and theories that engage with digital innovations; examine terminology around new media and digital technologies; and consider how new media are related to emerging literary techniques and aesthetics. Working across a variety of forms including literature, art, film and born-digital works, this module will combine primary texts with theory and analysis to investigate how cultural production continues to open up new understandings of an imagined “digital future”.

Selected reading and creative works

NovelMarge Piercy
He, She and It
EssayDonna Haraway
A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s
EssayAlondra Nelson
Afrofuturism: Past-Future Visions
GameFrank Lantz
Universal Paperclips

The End of Life as We Know It

The Implications of Digital Technology

What changes when search engines, social media, mobile phones and virtual reality become part of everyday life? This module brings technologies into conversation with their cultural representations to examine their histories, politics and effects on different communities.

Module description

This module will give students the opportunity to explore the artefacts, effects, and politics of our increasingly digital moment. Each week will focus on a specific technology (e.g. social media, mobile phones, digital currencies, videogames, virtual reality, or search engines) and explore its current and projected impacts, its context of use, and its place in a history of technological development. The module will also investigate the connection between these phenomena and their artistic representations in books, films, television shows, and/or videogames. What role does artwork and discussion in the humanities play in the development, dissemination, and criticism of these new forces in our lives? And what wide-reaching influences might these technologies have as they are ever-increasingly adopted?

Selected reading and creative works

NovelKiley Reid
Such a Fun Age
Short storyNaomi Kritzer
Cat Pictures Please
ChapterSafiya Umoja Noble
A Society, Searching, from Algorithms of Oppression
GameGalactic Cafe
The Stanley Parable

Teaching practice

Making room for different encounters.

Learning through making

In Interactivity, students develop a creative portfolio alongside their critical work. It can take the form of interactive fiction, performance, a game, a film or playable nonfiction. Making a piece gives students a way to test the ideas they encounter in their reading.

Virtual reality in the humanities

I have developed individual and group VR sessions, with preparation and reflection guides that support students’ wellbeing as well as their critical engagement. I have shared this approach through workshops and demonstrations with colleagues across disciplines.

Read the VR teaching case study

Access to digital texts

I worked with university IT colleagues to develop a cloud-based library of games and electronic texts for teaching and off-campus study, supported by agreements with publishers and developers.

Reconsidering the curriculum

Questions of race, gender, disability and unequal access run through these modules. In 2020, I shared changes to Digital Futures and The End of Life as We Know It in a departmental workshop on decolonising the curriculum.

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education with Distinction, University of Birmingham, 2020.

Interactive teaching resource

Solo RPG Influence Map

Explore solo role-playing games through a map, timeline and comparison tools. Follow the sources behind documented relationships and find different approaches to play.

Open the map

Supervision and collaboration

Research through digital culture.

My doctoral supervision has included cyberpunk, digital humanities, and game localisation and machine translation. I also supervise undergraduate and MA dissertations.

I welcome conversations about teaching digital cultures, creative assessment and related research.

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