Aleena Chia presents to the Institute

Aleena Leng An Chia is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication specializing in the ethnography of gaming cultures. Her research investigates practices at the margins of the digital and analogue, and in the interstices between work and play. Her work examines gaming’s boundary work as structuring categories in post-Fordism, as achievement systems in player communities, and as moral calculations in the new economy. In addition to ethnographic and qualitative approaches, she uses media archaeology and critical discourse analysis to study marginal forms of media: artefacts such as neuro-wearables for lucid dreaming and practices such as digital minimalism in social media disconnection. Her goal across these projects is to politicize the emotional and spiritual undercurrents of instrumental rationality in digital media.

Aleena received her PhD in Communication and Culture from Indiana University Bloomington in 2017 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland’s Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies in 2018. Her work has been supported by training from the School of Criticism and Theory, funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and a Research Internship at Microsoft Research New England’s Social Media Collective.