Astrid Ensslin
Biographic Data
| ID | 105869 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Astrid Ensslin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Astrid |
| FAMILY NAME | Ensslin |
| SIGNATURE | ENSSLIN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bangor University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2189-0025 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
“It Just Adds More Fuel to the Weak Woman Fire”: Perimenopausal “Excuses”, Feminist Dilemmas, and the Politics of Menstruation Tracking Apps
Perimenopause is often marked by unpredictable bodily changes. This unpredictability sits in tension with dominant cultural discourses that valorise self-discipline, control, and health optimisation. In this context, menstruation tracking apps are promoted as tools for self-management through bodily surveillance, reinforcing a “mythical norm” of bodily control and stability. Using cooperative inquiry, within a poststructuralist feminist framework…
Problematising menstrual tracking apps: Presenting a novel critical scoping review methodology for mapping and interpreting research literature
OBJECTIVES: To showcase a novel, theoretically informed methodology for conducting scoping reviews by operationalising critical theory. And to advance the field of women's digital health by applying this critical scoping review methodology (CSR) to research on menstrual tracking apps (MTAs). METHODS AND MEASURES: 116 articles published in English, between November 2015 and November 2023, focusing on MTAs, and/or user's experiences of MTAs, were t…
Analyzing Distant Play as Parasocial Resistance: Unnatural Temporality, Interpassive Dis-Reading, and Existentialist Angst in The Longing
This article offers the first systematic analytical methodology to understand distant play as a multidimensional, ludoliterary, critical, and philosophical practice of engaging with so-called idle or semi-idle games. It uses Anselm Pyta’s The Longing, a so far underexplored semi-idle, slow game that challenges traditional gameplay paradigms through its metareferential, bookish, philosophical, and contemplative structure, as a case study. Our cent…
Paths to transformation across contemporary reading practices: The role of motivations and genre preferences
Transformative effects of reading, in terms of shifts in self-understanding and enhanced social cognition, have been the topic of a variety of theoretical and empirical studies recently (cf. Fialho, 2019; Kuiken & Sopčák, 2021). However, most studies on this topic focus on print (and literary) fiction, thus ignoring the multifaceted, transmedial reading practices of the digital era. The present study tackles this gap in research with a systematic…
Reading Digital Fiction: Narrative, Cognition, Mediality
Reading Digital Fiction offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of digital fiction from a cognitive and empirical perspective. Proposing the new concept of “medial reading”, it argues for the centrality of an audience’s interest in, awareness of and/or attention to the medium in which a text is produced and received, and which we argue should be applied to reader data across media. The…
The Routledge Companion to Literary Media
Developing a Choice-Based Digital Fiction for Body Image Bibliotherapy
Body dissatisfaction is so common in the western world that it has become the norm, especially among women and girls. Writing New Body Worlds is a transdisciplinary research-creation project that aims to address these issues by developing an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy. It is created with the critical co-design participation of a group of young women and non-binary individuals (aged 18–25) from diverse backgrounds, wh…
Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis
x, 211 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Approaches to Videogame Discourse: Lexis, Interaction, Textuality
The first significant collection of research in videogame linguistics, Approaches to Videogame Discourse features an international array of scholars in linguistics and communication studies exploring lexis, interaction and textuality in digital games. In the first section, “Lexicology, Localisation and Variation,” chapters cover productive processes surrounding gamer slang (ludolects), creativity and borrowing across languages, as well as industr…
The myth of the “clarté française”: Language ideologies and metalinguistic discourse of videogame speech accents on Reddit
Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies
"Examining the ways in which the media represents language-related issues and how it shapes and constructs what people think language is, this book offers a multilingual survey of the construction of language in and by the media. Tackling the big issues of identity, gender, youth, citizenship, politics and ideology across a range of mediums including television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the internet, Language in the Media brings together …
Transmediating Bildung: Video Games as Life Formation Narratives
This article examines the transmedial theme and narrative genre of Bildung (life formation) in relation to video games. It revisits key tenets of life formation theory insofar as they can be applied to a small but growing corpus of games that emphasize spiritual and philosophical maturation and advancement. We argue that Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is an oversimplified and ultimately unsuitable lens through which to analyze character development i…
Formulaic sequences in native and non-native argumentative writing in German
The aim of this paper is to contribute to learner corpus research into formulaic language in native and non-native German. To this effect, a corpus of argumentative essays written by advanced British students of German (WHiG) was compared with a corpus of argumentative essays written by German native speakers (Falko-L1). A corpus-driven analysis reveals a larger number of 3-grams in WHiG than in Falko-L1, which suggests that British advanced lear…
Literary Gaming
A new analytical framework for understanding literary videogames, the literary-ludic spectrum, illustrated by close readings of selected works. In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); th…
Analyzing Digital Fiction
1.Introduction: From Theorizing to Analyzing Digital Fiction Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian Rustad Section 1: Narratological Approaches 2. Media-Specific Metalepsis in 10:01 Alice Bell 3.Digital Fiction and Worlds of Perspective David Ciccoricco 4. Seeing into the Worlds of Digital Fiction Daniel Punday Section 2: Social Media and Ludological Approaches 5. Playing with rather than by the Rules: Metaludicity, Allusive Fallacy and Ill…
The Language of Gaming
The Language of Gaming examines the complex language of videogames and gaming from a discourse analytical perspective. Astrid Ensslin studies the discourses inscribed in videogames by their producers, as well as gamer and media meta-discourses, and focal areas include gamer slang, illocution, multimodality, and narrative structures
Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual
This book aims to provide insights into how second lives in the sense of virtual identities and communities are constructed textually, semiotically and discursively, specificallyin the online environment Second Life and Massively Multiplayer Online Games such as World of Warcraft. The books philosophy is multi-disciplinary and itsgoal is to explore the question of how we as gamers and residents of virtual worlds construct alternative online reali…
Training humanities doctoral students in collaborative and digital multimedia
This study reports on the pedagogic rationale, didactic design and implications of an AHRC-funded doctoral training scheme in collaborative and digital multimedia in the humanities. In the second part of this article we discuss three areas of provision that were identified as particularly significant and/or controversial. These include (1) desktop publishing and information design for academic posters, (2) quantitative, corpus-based approaches to…
What an un-wiki way of doing things: Wikipedia’s multilingual policy and metalinguistic practice
Wikipediadefines itself as “the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the internet”, thus featuring an explicit language policy in its mission statement. Bearing in mind that the site has become the most popular source of encyclopaedic information online, its significance for public encounters with multilingualism should not be underestimated. This article offers a critical and multimodal discourse analytical approach toWikipedia’s ex…
Women in Games 2007: New platforms, new perspectives, new players: University of Wales, Newport, School of Art, Media and Design, 19–21 April 2007. Conference report
Introduction to Multimodal Analysis by David Machin
But her language skills shifted the family dynamics dramatically.”
Drawing on recent work on language ideologies as ‘sets of representations’ and ‘belief systems’ that are central not only to the construction of languages, but also their communities of users or publics, this paper explores the ways in which language is represented in relation to gender in two British newspapers, The Times and The Guardian. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of texts containing 96 instances of the term…
But her language skills shifted the family dynamics dramatically’
Drawing on recent work on language ideologies as ‘sets of representations’ and ‘belief systems’ that are central not only to the construction of languages, but also their communities of users or publics, this paper explores the ways in which language is represented in relation to gender in two British newspapers, The Times and the Guardian. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of texts containing 96 instances of the term…
The Art of English: Literary Creativity , Edited by Sharon Goodman and Kieran O'Halloran
Women in Wasteland – Gendered Deserts in T. S. Eliot and Shelley Jackson
The notion of the gendered desert as an ambivalent setting, encompassing death and survival, has found manifestations in both modernist and postmodernist Anglophone literature. The wasteland topos is seen here as a paradoxical offshoot of the pastoral tradition. Whereas T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) employs it to express post-war disillusionment in abstract, psychological terms, Shelley Jackson's Jackson, S. 1993. Patchwork Girl – or A Mode…
Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies
"Examining the ways in which the media represents language-related issues and how it shapes and constructs what people think language is, this book offers a multilingual survey of the construction of language in and by the media. Tackling the big issues of identity, gender, youth, citizenship, politics and ideology across a range of mediums including television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the internet, Language in the Media brings together …
What an un-wiki way of doing things: Wikipedia’s multilingual policy and metalinguistic practice
Wikipediadefines itself as “the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the internet”, thus featuring an explicit language policy in its mission statement. Bearing in mind that the site has become the most popular source of encyclopaedic information online, its significance for public encounters with multilingualism should not be underestimated. This article offers a critical and multimodal discourse analytical approach toWikipedia’s ex…
But her language skills shifted the family dynamics dramatically.”
Drawing on recent work on language ideologies as ‘sets of representations’ and ‘belief systems’ that are central not only to the construction of languages, but also their communities of users or publics, this paper explores the ways in which language is represented in relation to gender in two British newspapers, The Times and The Guardian. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of texts containing 96 instances of the term…
The myth of the “clarté française”: Language ideologies and metalinguistic discourse of videogame speech accents on Reddit
Introduction to Multimodal Analysis by David Machin
Women in Wasteland – Gendered Deserts in T. S. Eliot and Shelley Jackson
The notion of the gendered desert as an ambivalent setting, encompassing death and survival, has found manifestations in both modernist and postmodernist Anglophone literature. The wasteland topos is seen here as a paradoxical offshoot of the pastoral tradition. Whereas T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) employs it to express post-war disillusionment in abstract, psychological terms, Shelley Jackson's Jackson, S. 1993. Patchwork Girl – or A Mode…
But her language skills shifted the family dynamics dramatically.”
Drawing on recent work on language ideologies as ‘sets of representations’ and ‘belief systems’ that are central not only to the construction of languages, but also their communities of users or publics, this paper explores the ways in which language is represented in relation to gender in two British newspapers, The Times and The Guardian. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of texts containing 96 instances of the term…
But her language skills shifted the family dynamics dramatically’
Drawing on recent work on language ideologies as ‘sets of representations’ and ‘belief systems’ that are central not only to the construction of languages, but also their communities of users or publics, this paper explores the ways in which language is represented in relation to gender in two British newspapers, The Times and the Guardian. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of texts containing 96 instances of the term…
The Art of English: Literary Creativity , Edited by Sharon Goodman and Kieran O'Halloran
Women in Games 2007: New platforms, new perspectives, new players: University of Wales, Newport, School of Art, Media and Design, 19–21 April 2007. Conference report
Introduction to Multimodal Analysis by David Machin
Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual
This book aims to provide insights into how second lives in the sense of virtual identities and communities are constructed textually, semiotically and discursively, specificallyin the online environment Second Life and Massively Multiplayer Online Games such as World of Warcraft. The books philosophy is multi-disciplinary and itsgoal is to explore the question of how we as gamers and residents of virtual worlds construct alternative online reali…
Training humanities doctoral students in collaborative and digital multimedia
This study reports on the pedagogic rationale, didactic design and implications of an AHRC-funded doctoral training scheme in collaborative and digital multimedia in the humanities. In the second part of this article we discuss three areas of provision that were identified as particularly significant and/or controversial. These include (1) desktop publishing and information design for academic posters, (2) quantitative, corpus-based approaches to…
What an un-wiki way of doing things: Wikipedia’s multilingual policy and metalinguistic practice
Wikipediadefines itself as “the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the internet”, thus featuring an explicit language policy in its mission statement. Bearing in mind that the site has become the most popular source of encyclopaedic information online, its significance for public encounters with multilingualism should not be underestimated. This article offers a critical and multimodal discourse analytical approach toWikipedia’s ex…
The Language of Gaming
The Language of Gaming examines the complex language of videogames and gaming from a discourse analytical perspective. Astrid Ensslin studies the discourses inscribed in videogames by their producers, as well as gamer and media meta-discourses, and focal areas include gamer slang, illocution, multimodality, and narrative structures
Analyzing Digital Fiction
1.Introduction: From Theorizing to Analyzing Digital Fiction Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian Rustad Section 1: Narratological Approaches 2. Media-Specific Metalepsis in 10:01 Alice Bell 3.Digital Fiction and Worlds of Perspective David Ciccoricco 4. Seeing into the Worlds of Digital Fiction Daniel Punday Section 2: Social Media and Ludological Approaches 5. Playing with rather than by the Rules: Metaludicity, Allusive Fallacy and Ill…
Literary Gaming
A new analytical framework for understanding literary videogames, the literary-ludic spectrum, illustrated by close readings of selected works. In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); th…
Formulaic sequences in native and non-native argumentative writing in German
The aim of this paper is to contribute to learner corpus research into formulaic language in native and non-native German. To this effect, a corpus of argumentative essays written by advanced British students of German (WHiG) was compared with a corpus of argumentative essays written by German native speakers (Falko-L1). A corpus-driven analysis reveals a larger number of 3-grams in WHiG than in Falko-L1, which suggests that British advanced lear…
Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies
"Examining the ways in which the media represents language-related issues and how it shapes and constructs what people think language is, this book offers a multilingual survey of the construction of language in and by the media. Tackling the big issues of identity, gender, youth, citizenship, politics and ideology across a range of mediums including television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the internet, Language in the Media brings together …
Transmediating Bildung: Video Games as Life Formation Narratives
This article examines the transmedial theme and narrative genre of Bildung (life formation) in relation to video games. It revisits key tenets of life formation theory insofar as they can be applied to a small but growing corpus of games that emphasize spiritual and philosophical maturation and advancement. We argue that Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is an oversimplified and ultimately unsuitable lens through which to analyze character development i…
Approaches to Videogame Discourse: Lexis, Interaction, Textuality
The first significant collection of research in videogame linguistics, Approaches to Videogame Discourse features an international array of scholars in linguistics and communication studies exploring lexis, interaction and textuality in digital games. In the first section, “Lexicology, Localisation and Variation,” chapters cover productive processes surrounding gamer slang (ludolects), creativity and borrowing across languages, as well as industr…
The myth of the “clarté française”: Language ideologies and metalinguistic discourse of videogame speech accents on Reddit
Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis
x, 211 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Developing a Choice-Based Digital Fiction for Body Image Bibliotherapy
Body dissatisfaction is so common in the western world that it has become the norm, especially among women and girls. Writing New Body Worlds is a transdisciplinary research-creation project that aims to address these issues by developing an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy. It is created with the critical co-design participation of a group of young women and non-binary individuals (aged 18–25) from diverse backgrounds, wh…
The Routledge Companion to Literary Media
Reading Digital Fiction: Narrative, Cognition, Mediality
Reading Digital Fiction offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of digital fiction from a cognitive and empirical perspective. Proposing the new concept of “medial reading”, it argues for the centrality of an audience’s interest in, awareness of and/or attention to the medium in which a text is produced and received, and which we argue should be applied to reader data across media. The…
Paths to transformation across contemporary reading practices: The role of motivations and genre preferences
Transformative effects of reading, in terms of shifts in self-understanding and enhanced social cognition, have been the topic of a variety of theoretical and empirical studies recently (cf. Fialho, 2019; Kuiken & Sopčák, 2021). However, most studies on this topic focus on print (and literary) fiction, thus ignoring the multifaceted, transmedial reading practices of the digital era. The present study tackles this gap in research with a systematic…
“It Just Adds More Fuel to the Weak Woman Fire”: Perimenopausal “Excuses”, Feminist Dilemmas, and the Politics of Menstruation Tracking Apps
Perimenopause is often marked by unpredictable bodily changes. This unpredictability sits in tension with dominant cultural discourses that valorise self-discipline, control, and health optimisation. In this context, menstruation tracking apps are promoted as tools for self-management through bodily surveillance, reinforcing a “mythical norm” of bodily control and stability. Using cooperative inquiry, within a poststructuralist feminist framework…
Problematising menstrual tracking apps: Presenting a novel critical scoping review methodology for mapping and interpreting research literature
OBJECTIVES: To showcase a novel, theoretically informed methodology for conducting scoping reviews by operationalising critical theory. And to advance the field of women's digital health by applying this critical scoping review methodology (CSR) to research on menstrual tracking apps (MTAs). METHODS AND MEASURES: 116 articles published in English, between November 2015 and November 2023, focusing on MTAs, and/or user's experiences of MTAs, were t…
Analyzing Distant Play as Parasocial Resistance: Unnatural Temporality, Interpassive Dis-Reading, and Existentialist Angst in The Longing
This article offers the first systematic analytical methodology to understand distant play as a multidimensional, ludoliterary, critical, and philosophical practice of engaging with so-called idle or semi-idle games. It uses Anselm Pyta’s The Longing, a so far underexplored semi-idle, slow game that challenges traditional gameplay paradigms through its metareferential, bookish, philosophical, and contemplative structure, as a case study. Our cent…
Computer Science (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Art (10 works) · Digital Games and Media (10 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · History (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Literature (6 works) · Political science (6 works)