This talk will be a playful–joyus, yet also sorrowful and mournful–reading from Repairing Play juxtaposed against music from the book. Repairing Play aims to unsettle centuries of discourse around play as it has been theorized within the European tradition, specifically it makes the case that play can be as painful as it is pleasurable when viewed through the lens of Black radical aesthetics. In this presentation I am aim to reify the validity of alternative forms of knowledge and also draw attention to the importance of dance, performance, and song as they relates to play beyond games.
Aaron Trammell is an Associate Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. He is interested in how tabletop games further values of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in geek culture. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies, Multimedia Editor at Sounding Out!, the co-editor for the Tabletop Gaming series at University of Michigan Press, and also a co-editor for the Postmillenial Pop Series at NYU Press. He has two books Repairing Play (2023 MIT Press) is a theory of play that centers BIPOC people and The Privilege of Play (