One of the biggest concerns right now for academics who are also parents is figuring out how to juggle education for both their students and their children. Many K–12 and higher education institutions have moved to remote instruction for the fall while racialized patriarchy and heteronormativity shape domestic duties in the home space that is now many peoples’ work space as well.
Episode 116 of Imagine Otherwise addresses how academic parents are navigating this terrain and developing a social justice framework for digital learning. In the episode, host Cathy Hannabach interviews digital media professor Kishonna Gray, who uses feminism and racial justice to address what she calls the 3 Ps of online teaching: people, pedagogy, and platforms.
Kishonna and Cathy discuss building learning experiences that privilege experimentation and radical simplicity, how academic parents and non-parents can structure working from home around their unique needs, why meeting students where they are needs to be a core part of our new normal, and why approaching work and life from an ethics of care is how Kishonna imagines otherwise.
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You can also read the transcript and show notes on the Ideas on Fire website, which have links to Kishonna’s work and all the concepts, people, and events we discuss on the show (great for teaching!).
Guest: Kishonna Gray
Kishonna Gray is a digital media scholar whose research examines the intersections of race and gender in digital media, with a particular focus on video games and gaming culture.
She is an assistant professor of communication and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Her most recent book, Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (Louisiana State University Press, 2020), explores the intersectional role of blackness in gaming as well as the capacity for gaming culture to foster critical consciousness, aid in participatory democracy, and effect social change. Kishonna is also the author of Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014) and coeditor of Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice (University of Washington Press, 2018) and Feminism in Play (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Kishonna’s research has been widely published in academic journals like Sociology Compass and ADA: A Journal of New Media and Technology, as well as media outlets such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Paste Magazine, BET, and Blavity. She is also a featured blogger and podcaster with Not Your Mama’s Gamer.
