Public lecture by visiting scholars Anthony Enns and Anne Kustritz.
Location: MMU, Geoffrey Manton Building, Room 327
Date and time: Monday 11th May, 17.00–18.30
Playing with the Planet: Board Games and the Procedural Rhetoric of Population Management
For hundreds of years, kings, politicians, and military leaders have used games to train, devise strategies, and imaginatively extend their control over the globe. This presentation sketches out our manuscript project, which explores board games that simulate systems of population management via rules and procedures that promote domination, oppression, and unequal global distribution of wealth and power. Chapter one examines economic simulations of colonial trade, which treat humans as commodities. Chapter two focuses on political simulations of emancipation, which often inadvertently reinforce colonial logics by representing enslaved people as commodities or simplifying historical contingencies of race. Chapter three examines how military simulations of nuclear war justify acts of mass extermination by promoting the idea that such wars are survivable and even winnable. Chapter four investigates scientific simulations that desensitize players to the suffering of others by focusing on curing diseases rather than patients. Chapter five analyzes ecological simulations depicting unethical solutions to overpopulation or promoting paradoxically un-ecological techno-fixes for global warming. We conclude by examining games that depict AI, which introduce new ways of imagining population management by reversing the trajectory of human mastery, as decisions are taken out of human hands, and humans become subject to automated systems of control.
Bios:
Anthony Enns is an Associate Professor in English and Media Studies at Dalhousie University. His work on popular culture has appeared in such journals as Journal of Popular Film and Television, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Popular Culture Review, Screen, Screen Bodies, Studies in Popular Culture, and Television and New Media, as well as the anthologies The Scary Screen (2010), Comics and the City (2010), Musicals at the Margins (2021), Consumerism and Prestige (2022), and Digressions in Deep Time (2024).
Anne Kustritz is an Assistant Professor in Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Her work deals with creative fan communities, transformative works, digital economies, and representational politics. She is the author of Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction: Pocket Publics, which documents the digital transition of the slash fan fiction community around the turn of the millennium and the “pockets” of counterpublic space they constructed for the circulation of new forms of gender, sexuality, and relationality. Her articles appear in Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of American Culture, and Sexualities.
