Adrienne Shaw is an Associate Professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production and a member of the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication graduate faculty. She is 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 has also co-edited threeanthologies: Queer Game Studies (2017, University of Minnesota Press), Queer Technologies: Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence (2017, Routledge), and Interventions: Communication Research and Practice (2018, Peter Lang). She is also the founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive and co-curator of Rainbow Arcade, the world’s first exhibit of LGBTQ game history (Dec 2018-May 2019 in Berlin, Germany). 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
- 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 (2018, 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 is a co-editor of New York University Press’s Critical Cultural Communication book series, an incoming associate editor for the Journal of Communication, and serves on editorial/review boards for International Journal of Cultural Studies; Media, Culture, & Society; Critical Studies in Media Communication; Game Studies; and Not Your Mama’s Gamer.