Kurt Thumlert, a recent addition to IRDL and our resident fun guy. Kurt is a lecturer in York University’s Faculty of Education. His research and teaching focus on production pedagogies and new media, the arts and multimodal literacies, and informal/DIY cultural production. Kurt’s work examines the opportunities of digital media, game-based learning, and simulation and role-play for inviting sustained engagements within multiliteracy-learning challenges, as well as for supporting authentic modes of art and knowledge making. His courses invite students to critically co-explore the sociotechnical resources and participative opportunities of emerging media ecologies, as well as related production-based learning environments. Kurt’s recent publications include several articles co-authored with Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson on educational theory, games, and technology studies. Connect with Kurt via: Serious Play Lab Twitter: @MerlotPontiac

2023-21 Sounding off: Learning, Communicating, and Making Sense with Sound This project investigates existing professional subject matter experts (SMEs) and artistic “communities of practice” where sound/aural experience is central. It examines what and how people learn through inquiry into sounds, sound-making materials and aural/acoustic experience, and how (re)claiming sound as a vital ‘mode’ of sensory experience can afford new opportunities for sound-based inquiry across disciplines, as well as afford more inclusive and innovative music pedagogies adequate to 21st century learning contexts.

2015-2023 Refiguring Innovation in Games (ReFiG) is a 5-year project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Composed of an international collective of scholars, community organizers and industry representatives. ReFiG is committed to promoting diversity and equity in the game industry and culture and effecting real change in a space that has been exclusionary to so many.   More information about the project is available on the website: www.refig.ca  

This project explores the tensions between the commercial constructions of youth cultures and the lived experiences of the embodied young person. It addresses how the tween girl is narrowly defined as a white heterosexual consuming subject and how she engages with such framings. This research has two main goals. The first is to explore how the cultural industries of girlhood, including digital media properties and global transmedia conglomerates, contribute to the synergistic forces of global capitalism to produce the tween as a global assemblage. The second goal is to explore what girls do with the tween cultures that are produced for them—but rarely by them—by asking how they negotiate these resources of subjectivity in their everyday lives and by looking at the immaterial labour of their participation in digital media and social media networks. This study will move beyond the work that is currently being done in the fields of critical technology studies, media studies, and girls’ studies by exploring how girls engage with a construction of girlhood that dominates much of the transnational mediascape and meets the needs of the global marketplace. In doing so we will uncover some of the tensions between the commercial worlds of youth cultures and the lived experiences of the embodied young person.