Alumni Voices: Carly Kocurek
Back on September 12 here at UT, the department hosted a great talk by one of our recent graduates, Dr. Carly Kocurek, who discussed "What We Talk About When We Talk About Ms. Pacman." Before her talk, we sat down with Carly to discuss her current research as well as her time at as a graduate student at UT.
What will you be talking about today?Today I will be talking about the nostalgia for what gets called the golden era of the video game arcade, which I position roughly between 1972 to 1985 (there's some wiggle room in there). There's been a real vogue for new arcades and archiving projects both formal and informal, so I'm talking about that, but I'm also talking about what's at stake in this resurgence of interest in arcades, and what people are actually trying to preserve or longing for when we they talk about a kind of arcade that many of us didn't experience firsthand. I'm positioning all of this within the context of the current culture wars of gaming.How did you get interested in this topic? Is it part of a larger project?I'm wrapping up my book, which doesn't yet have a title (that's the last thing that happens in that process), but it's about the classic arcade and the creation of the gamer that happens around the classic arcade. Even though that term is used later, from the 1990s forward, there's already an emerging idea in the 1970s of who plays games. The word "vidiots" is used -- there's actually a little magazine called Vidiots -- that was published for what we would now call gamers and was sold through arcades. I got interested in that because I was interested in gender and games and the assumptions about who plays games and why. I wondered, when did we start assuming that women don't play games, and why did this happen? If we look at media history, especially when we look at how many different media are considered feminized, for example film or television (there's strongly gendered traditions there that we generally think of as feminine) it appears peculiar that we think of games as being something that is "for boys." Looking at that early coverage of games, I wondered, what are we saying about games, who are we saying they are for, why are we worried about who games are for? I argue that there are a lot of factors that influence this, including the Cold War and the Space Race and the technological anxieties of the time, as well as the ongoing crisis of masculinity in the U.S. in the twentieth century and especially after World War II. There's also the story of the coin-op industry itself, which was trying to look respectable and really struggled -- still does -- with looking respectable. They saw these young, clean-cut men playing games as a good way to stake their claim for respectability, saying, "Look, we're doing good things for the kids!" But what happened is that we have all these images of boys playing games, which is powerful and narrows down who designers think they are catering to.There's something at stake here that is important and needs an intervention, needs to be exposed. I think there's a lot of good in gaming, even though we often hear about the terrible misogyny and racism in the gaming world. The gaming industry employs a lot of artists and there's a lot of emphasis on design and teaching social behaviors and imparting important skills which people value and love, and that's why people are so passionate about gaming. But what does it mean when that is not open to everyone? That is the real question.How does your work build on what you did as an American Studies graduate student at UT?This work is an update and expansion of what was at one point the final chapter of my dissertation. It has been a few years, so that work has moved and changed quite a bit in part because of something I started to notice--the recent revival of the classic arcade, with places like Barcade in Brooklyn. I wondered, how come Dave and Buster's is a place that corporations have events? There's Pinballz in Austin, which is a really wonderful arcade, and my neighborhood in Chicago has an arcade called Emporium.This all started when I was working on my dissertation at UT. My original question was, why do we think games are for men and boys? I could ask people why they think that now, but there's actually a historical process that helps us understand this. It's not a "natural" occurrence. I was also really interested in what young women are doing with pop culture and how they are responding to and through pop culture.Do you have any advice for current graduate students about how to get the most out of their time at UT?For me, it was really important to have a hobby or something that I was spending a lot of time on that didn't have to do with school. Sometimes that was volunteer work, sometimes it was sports, it just depended. I think it made my writing a lot better, because I spent a lot of time freelancing and blogging and things like that. I also think it's good to have a backup plan, and that's not just because the job market is terrible, which I think everyone gets told all the time, but also because you might realize that you want to do something else. I think keeping in mind that you are actually a person and not just a graduate student is really great. When I was going through the death spiral of the job market my last year, I was making a plan for what I might do instead. For me, I would have gotten a game design certificate at ACC and looked for a job in the industry. That's not the right fit for everyone, but that would have been an okay path for me. We have alumni that teach at really amazing high schools, or run really excellent nonprofits or make documentaries or work for the state department. All kinds of things. Thinking about how you would apply your interests later is a good thing to do.
Announcement: "The End of Austin" Named One of 2014's Best Publications
Every year, The Austin Chronicle solicits readers' and critics' assessments of Austin's best institutions: restaurants, bars, swimming holes, museums, publications, and more. This year, the publication lists the Department of American Studies' own The End of Austin as one of 2014's best publications, naming it the "Best Place to Rise Above the Old Austin vs. New Austin Fray."
The End of Austin was founded in Fall 2011 as a pilot project within Dr. Randolph Lewis's "Documenting America" graduate seminar. The site relaunched as an extracurricular digital humanities project in Winter 2013 and is currently collecting submissions for its sixth issue. In addition to Dr. Lewis, members of the editorial board include American Studies graduate students Carrie Andersen, Sean Cashbaugh, Ashlyn Davis, Brendan Gaughen, Julie Kantor, and Emily Roehl. For more information about the project's development, see The End of Austin's press page.For more information, contact the editorial board at endofaustin@gmail.com.
Grad Research: Eric Covey's Intro AMS course creates photography Tumblr
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It should come as no surprise that our department takes digital and new media very seriously. Many of our professors and instructors have integrated online tools into their research and in their teaching with fascinating and wonderful results. So, needless to say, we're thrilled to share with you a photography project that emerged out of recent Ph.D. graduate Eric Covey's summer introductory American Studies course, which centered on foodways in America.Here's what Eric had to say about the project in a blog post, the full text of which is available here:
This time around I decided to slightly refocus the course—engaging more closely with the field of American studies that has been my intellectual home for a decade now— but to still maintain an emphasis on US foodways. I would draw from many of my previous lectures, but each day’s class (this was a small lecture with about 40 students) would begin with a discussion of a selected keyword from editors Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler’s collection of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007). The resulting course would be dubbed “Introduction to American Studies: Keywords and Key Foods.”In practical terms, what this meant was that when I lectured about rice in West Africa and the Stono Uprising in South Carolina, students came to class having read African (Kevin Gaines). And when I lectured on barbecue and cotton culture in Central Texas, they read Region (Sandra A. Zagarell). Since this was a summer course, additional reading beyond keywords was light. Students read William Cronon’s “Seasons of Want and Plenty” from Changes in the Land alongside Colonial (David Kazanjian) the day I lectured on maize. My lecture on bananas was prefaced by Cynthia Enloe’s “Carmen Miranda on My Mind” from Bananas, Beaches and Bases and Empire (Shelley Streeby). I explained to students on the first day of class that what I expected was for them to develop a vocabulary that they could use in a variety of settings.Of course I also expected them to demonstrate some mastery of this vocabulary in their coursework. Three exams asked students to identify material from the class and explain its significance using the language ofKeywords. I also assigned a photo project that required them to take a photo of a local food site and write a brief caption (450-900 words, also drawing on Keywords) to accompany the photo. These photos and captions were posted to a collective Tumblr at http://amskeywordskeyfoods.tumblr.com. When I initially described the project to my students, I suggested two approaches they might take: first, they could show how their photo illustrated a particular keyword; Or, second, they might use one of the keywords to analyze the photo. On the due date, students e-mailed me their photo and caption. Because Tumblr is mostly user friendly, it only took me a few hours to upload all the images and uniformly-formatted text.
The End of Austin Issue 5 Launches
We are pleased to announce that issue 5 of The End of Austin is now published.Featuring the work of current UT American Studies Ph.D. candidates Brendan Gaughen and Jeannette Vaught, as well as Adam Tallman, David Villarreal, Megan Coxe, Andres Lombana Bermudez, Jack Murphy, Derek Sayer, Riley Triggs, Jonathan Silverman, Adrian Mesko, Monty Jones, Álvaro Torres, Daniel Perera, Jonathan Lowell, Emily Mixon, and Joy Luther, this issue addresses topics like Slacker 25 years later, shared services at UT, flooding in Onion Creek, the F-1 track, weirdness in Austin, cedar fever, and more.2014 has been an exciting year already for the project. Having surpassed 50,000 unique page views, the site continues to gain momentum as an invaluable source for conversations about Austin's changing identity. This year, we've been featured in a variety of national and international press outlets, including British Airways's High Life Magazine and Bavarian Public Radio's Bayern 2 for an hour-long feature about Austin - not to mention UT's own The Daily Texan.Members of the The End of Austin editorial board were also asked by the University of Texas to speak at the UT Chancellor's Council Annual Meeting on May 2. Randy Lewis, Sean Cashbaugh, and Carrie Andersen gave a well-received lecture to nearly 200 donors about the project, the field of American Studies, and what they anticipate of Austin's future.We hope you enjoy this issue, available here - and please share it with anyone you know who may be interested in Austin's metamorphosis.