Alexandrina Agloro presents “Designing in Detail: Creating Community-Based Interactive Media” at Grinnell College, Friday September 22, 4-5:30pm, at Burling Library Lounge (free and open to the public):

How can interactive media supplement and support justice-related social movements? Alexandrina Agloro, media artist and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Game Development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, will discuss the mechanics of game design and how they can contribute to the ways we think about organizing and implementing activism. She will discuss her game, The Resisters, and its relationship to participatory design, culturally relevant education, and archives. Other interactive media and games will be showcased to highlight a framework of speculative design and how we can create change through our imagination.

Dr. Alexandrina Agloro (Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Game Development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute) is a game designer, community-based researcher, and media artist who believes in the possibilities of the decolonial imaginary using digital media as an emancipatory tool. Her most recent game, The Resisters, was an alternate reality game she designed through participatory research with young people of color about local social movement history in Providence, RI. Before joining WPI, she earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and an M.A. from the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, where she researched adolescent girls of color and their race and gender identity development through online doll play. Alexandrina utilizes principles of self-determination and relevant education in her teaching and research. She teaches at university and high school levels, and specializes in digital media skill building with young people of color. She is a co-chair of Situated Critical Race + Media (SCR+M!) of FemTechNet, a multi-university collaborative feminist technology organization. She is the Futurist for the Latinx Pacific Archive and is working on developing a line of ovulation-tracking jewelry that is both affordable and flawlessly stylish. As a community-based researcher and participatory designer, her speculative work is still anchored in lived experience. She works closely with New Urban Arts, a youth art studio and imagination incubator. Alexandrina uses critical pedagogy and community-based research as platforms to work with institutions, community organizations, researchers, and artists. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-John E. Sawyer Seminars, the Teagle Foundation, the Rhode Island Council of the Humanities, and the Voqal Fund.