The UC Santa Barbara MultiCultural Center is hosting its first Race Matters event at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, entitled “Brown Skins, White Avatars: Racebending and Straightwashing in Digital Games” in the MCC Lounge.

This free lecture will be given by visiting assistant professor at the University of Oregon, Edmond Chang. 

Given recent critiques of the lack of diversity in digital games, this presentation examines the many ways games are stereotypical and normative in regarding race, gender and sexuality.

How are we to unpack the ways characters of color are often rendered as either lighter-skinned protagonists or darker-skinned enemies?

Or how might we understand how game design problematically constrains gender and sexuality? 

Chang is a visiting assistant professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon. His areas of interest include technoculture, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, video games, popular culture and contemporary American literature.

He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and his dissertation is entitled “Technoqueer: Re/con/figuring Posthuman Narratives.”

For more information, visit www.edmondchang.com.

— Carol Dinh is the publicist and marketing coordinator at the UCSB MultiCultural Center.