Event Details

This Lancaster Literacy Research Centre event will be a talk from Chris Bailey titled Meaning Making, Multimodality and Minecraft: Developing research around screen based play.

Abstract:

'Meaning Making, Multimodality and Minecraft: Developing research around screen-based play'

In this presentation, Chris draws on the work outlined in his forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan book Researching Virtual Play Experiences: Visual Methods in Education Research. Here, he illuminates the lived experience of a group of primary school children engaged in virtual world play during a year-long after-school club. Shaped by post-structuralist theory and New Literacy Studies, this work outlines a playful, participatory and emergent methodological approach, referred to as ‘rhizomic ethnography’. Chris’ work uses words and images - including comic strips – to demonstrate how children’s creation of a digital community through Minecraft was shaped by the both the game and their wider social and cultural experiences. Through the exploration of various dimensions of the club, including visual and soundscape data, Chris seeks to demonstrate what he calls the ‘emergent dimension of play’. This presentation will be of interest and value to researchers of children’s play, as well as those who explore visual methods and design multimodal research outputs.

Event schedule:

11:00am - Welcomes & introductions (please enter the meeting with your 'real' name as your display name, and your camera switched on, to allow us to all put faces to each others' names)

11:05 - Presentation from Speaker Name(s) (please turn your camera off and mute your microphone during the presentation)

11:40 - Discussion (please use the raise hand feature on Teams to indicate you would like to have a turn speaking and once asked to speak by an event facilitator, please un-mute your microphone and turn your camera on)

Presenter bio:

Chris is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Sheffield Hallam University. His research converges around a focus on people’s experience of place and space. This includes exploration of play, literacies, community and culture; physical, virtual and hybrid space; lived and affective experience. He is also interested in multimodal literacies and meaning making practices and has employed various visual and aural modes in his own academic work. This is exemplified by recent work that uses comic strips, illustration and a focus on soundscapes as a means of exploring theory and representing the complexity of the social world.