Evan Conaway is a fourth year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. After getting his BA in Anthropology from the University of Georgia, Evan came to the University of California, Irvine to study gaming cultures. His dissertation work explores how the servers that run online games serve as sites of memory and culture, as new kinds of places of the digital age. This work addresses how online gamers are using servers to preserve, memorialize, and restore virtual worlds and online games, and how servers matter to gamers both as social places and in geopolitical places. He is specifically interested in understanding how virtual space is maintained and reproduced, often through illicit or unauthorized means, in relation to the material technologies that create it, and he seeks to identify the politics embedded in present-day efforts to engage with the pasts of virtual worlds.
Read more: https://sites.google.com/a/uci.edu/econaway/
Email: econaway@uci.edu
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