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. In 2019-2020 she will serve as interim director of Temple's new Graduate Certificate in Cultural Analytics. Shaw 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 co-edited three anthologies: 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). The Rainbow Arcade catalog can be purchased here. From 2011 to 2015 she was also part of the multi-million dollar and award winning CYCLES project, which developed games to train users to identify and mitigate cognitive biases. A full list of her publications is available via Google Scholar.
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
- LGBTQ video game history
- representations of marginalized groups in media
- cultural production
- qualitative research methods
- new communication technologies
More information on her classes and research can be found at her website: adrienneshaw.com.
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 Committee on Divisions and Interest Groups Mentoring/Coordinating.
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 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.
*Photo credit Anne Saint Peter, 2016