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Kishonna Gray

Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies and Africana Studies, University of Kentucky

While conversations around digital celebrity are often situated on users of social media, less attention has been given to celebrity within gaming contexts. And even then, these conversations are continually situated on white users who livestream to large (white) audiences. What is lesser known are the pathways to celebrity via livestreaming for populations outside of traditional, hegemonic trajectories, most namely Black users of streaming technology. As such, this commentary focuses on the pathways to visibility for Black gamers, and how ultimately livestreaming has become a space for Black technocultural production. This practice is made most prominent through three tools afforded to console gamers by digital gaming technologies.

 

Kishonna Gray is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University. Dr Gray is the author or co-editor of numerous books and articles including her foundational 2014 work Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins, 2018’s edited collections Woke Gaming and Feminism in Play and most recently Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. She also has a book currently under contract with NYU Press entitled Black Game Studies. She’s a highly sought after speaker and regularly addresses both academic and industry audiences such as at the Game Developers Conference. She is the winner of a number awards over the years including The Evelyn Gilbert Unsung Hero Award and the Blacks in Gaming Educator Award.

 

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