Adrienne Shaw is an Assistant Professor in Temple University's Department of Media Studies and Production, a member of the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication graduate faculty, and author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (winner of the 2016 International Communication Association's Popular Communications Division's Book Award). She is also co-editor of two edited anthologies: Queer Game Studies and Queer Technologies: Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence). Her current primary project is the LGBTQ Game Archive. From 2011 to 2015 she was also part of the government-funded CYCLES team.
Shaw received her PhD in 2010 from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied the intersections of new media, minority representation, and qualitative audience research.
Her research and teaching focus on
- video games & gaming culture
- representations of gender & sexuality
- cultural production and qualitative audience research
- new communication technologies
From 2011-2015 she served as Co-Chair of and conference organizer for the International Communication Association's LGBTQ Studies Special Interest Group, was theme chair for the 2017 ICA conference in San Diego, on the Task Forces for Divisions and Interest Groups and the Future of the Conference. She also co-organized two ICA preconferences: Stuart Hall and the Future of Cultural Studies (2015, San Juan, Puerto Rico) and Technologies of Sex and Gender Unconference (2014, Seattle, WA). Currently she is on the ICA Division and Interest Group Standing Committee.
She has also served on the program committee for the Digital Games Researcher Association Conference (2017, 2016) and is part of the DiGRA Diversity workshop. In 2014 she was on the program committee for the Meaningful Play Conference.
Finally Shaw serves on editorial/review boards for Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media; Media, Culture, & Society; Critical Studies in Media Communication; Game Studies; and Not Your Mama’s Gamer.