Jennifer Jenson
Biographic Data
| ID | 141387 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Jenson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Jenson |
| SIGNATURE | JENSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9018-1911 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 136 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Drawing and Play as Windows into a Child’s Multimodal Meaning-Making Development during Covid-19
Framed within multimodality and situated in a bounded socio-geographical context (i.e., Vancouver), this ethnographic case study provides an in-depth analysis of a bilingual 8-year-old girl’s literacy practices of meaning-making established across varied semiotic modes (i.e., linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, embodied, kinesthetic) during COVID-19. The study draws upon 13 open-ended informal interviews, three sessions of imaginative play, and 1…
Digital parents: Intergenerational learning through a digital literacy workshop
In this article, we present findings of a research study centered around a 10-week digital production workshop developed specifically for families in an urban school board, a population rich with culturally diverse immigrant families and English language learners (ELLs). The aim of this research was to support parents/guardians in an urban community in their development of a practical, hands-on understanding of twenty-first century literacies, us…
MakerMinds: An Exploratory Study of Making and Mindfulness Pedagogies
The purpose of this ethnographically informed research study was to explore the integration of making and mindfulness pedagogies in a single curricular intervention (“MakerMinds”) and, in particular, how making engages students in mindfulness content and encourages their independent use of mindfulness tools. Mindfulness programs have long been used to promote mental health in clinical and non-clinical settings. Related research with school-aged c…
Patriarchy in play: Video games as gendered media ecologies
Videogames are a dominant cultural, economic and creative medium in the twenty-first century, whose varied ecologies are increasingly recognized as particularly hostile environments to those identifying or identified as women. These ecologies include those encoded and enacted within the virtual environments of digital games, across the spectrum of those ecologies materially inhabited in games education, game cultures and, paradigmatically, the vi…
Twittering Research, Calling Out and Canceling Cultures: A Story and Some Questions
This is an analysis of how Twitter played a significant, agentive and accountable role in the difficult birth and premature unravelling of a government-funded international feminist research network. We situate this case study and this process of initiation and annihilation within the broader context within which social media platforms are a critical site of intensive affective discursive practices through which individual and institutional reput…
Making in schools: Student Learning Through an E-Textiles Curriculum
Making and maker spaces have attracted increasing attention as potential sites for supporting K-12 student learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and as a means of competency development for computational and design thinking as well as technological literacy. While interest in making and maker spaces is high, little empirical research has been conducted that evaluates student learning through making in K-12 classroom…
Literature @ the Speed of Thought: Hypertext and Tristram Shandy
Readers of Tristram Shandy are prepared early on for the extraordinary journey they are about to begin—a journey hosted by Tristram himself, a man whose purpose is to tell his life’s story without
Pathways to sustainable futures: A “production pedagogy” model for STEM education
Challenges with Measuring Learning through Digital Gameplay in K-12 Classrooms
Videogames have long been lauded for their potential to increase engagement and enhance learning when used in classrooms. At the same time, how to best evaluate learning presents challenges, especially when the game does not have standardized assessments built-into it and when games are taken up in a wide variety of ways in quite diverse contexts. This article details the use of a geography game to support learning in 32 diverse classrooms in Ont…
Authorship and professional digital presence in feminist blogs
This research traces the shift from stand-alone, personal blogging toward professionalized use of social media. To exemplify this process, we draw attention to the transition from pseudonymous to identifiable authorship in feminist blogging. This transition toward professional digital presence is important for two major reasons: first, it reveals how oppositional politics is part of the commercial circuits and neoliberal market logics of identity…
The Entrepreneurial Gamer: Regendering the Order of Play
The designation "gamer" is structurally bound to networked economies of digital play that are rewarded fiscally, socially, and publically, an order of play that is proving difficult to overturn. That girls and women have enjoyed at best marginal positions within video game cultures is by now well recognized, yet at the very same time is too easily dismissed in light of persuasively documented increases in the numbers of women who play. This artic…
Virtually Together: Examining Pre-Existing Relationships in MMOG Play
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have been a fruitful venue to study social interactions ranging from small temporary groups, to larger more permanent in-game social collectives such as guilds or clans. Much of this literature is focused on strangers becoming friends through MMOG play; comparatively, little is known about gameplay-based interactions between pre-existing romantic couples. To address that gap, this paper describes the met…
Levelling Up: Minors' Play in a Closed-system MMOG
In this paper, we present a study of 182 youths (ages 9 - 17) playing a closed-system Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), Guardian Academy. Its purpose was to investigate the online virtual world behaviours of youth under the age of 18 playing in an educational setting. We report on a mixed-methods study of minor players in situ across eight socioeconomically diversified educational communities, focused on characteristics, patterns, and tra…
Canadian Indie Games Between the Global and the Local
Background Independent or “indie” games play a significant role in the contemporary game industry, and Canada is home to several prominent hubs of indie gaming activity. Analysis Drawing on 34 interviews with developers and community organizers across the country, this article examines how Canadian indie game developers construct their identities and communities on three levels: global, national, and local. Conclusions and Implications While onli…
(En)gendering videogame development: A feminist approach to gender, education, and game studies
Over the past 10 years there has been growing recognition that digital media like movies, video games, and social networking technologies are changing the way we think about teaching and learning
Gaming Experience and Spatial Learning in a Virtual Morris Water Maze
Experience playing video games has been associated with perceptual and cognitive improvements (e.g., Castel, Pratt, & Drummond, 2005; Boot, Kramer, Simons, Fabiani, & Gratton, 2008; Colzato, van den Wildenberg, & Hommel, 2013; Oei & Patterson, 2013) For instance, video gamers show superior spatial abilities than non-gamers (Greenfield, Graig, & Lohr, 1994; Feng, Spence, and Pratt, 2007; Green & Bavelier, 2003). Given that such abilities have been…
Mis/Representations in School-Based Digital Media Production: An Ethnographic Exploration with Muslim Girls
In this article, the authors discuss findings from a digital media production club with racialized girls in a low-income school in Toronto, Ontario. Specifically, the authors consider how student-produced media is impacted by ongoing postcolonial structures relating to power and representation in the school and in the media production work of Muslim and other racialized girls. From this standpoint, the authors interrogate how technological tools …
Playing With Our Selves: Multiplicity and identity in online gaming
As more of our lives are spent online, often in environments in which we interact with others through virtual characters (“avatars”), there remains a gulf between how player practices are documented and theorized, and the complex gendered identity work players actually carry out. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), with a sample of 359 players and 659 avatars that compares male a…
Alienated Playbour: Relations of Production in EVE Online
This article explores the play practices of EVE Online industrialists: those primarily responsible for generating the materials and equipment that drive the game's robust economy. Applying the concept of "immaterial labor" to this underattended aspect of the EVE community, we consider the range of communicative and informational artifacts and activities industrialists enact in support of their involvement in the game-work that happens both in gam…
Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings
As research on virtual worlds gains increasing attention in educational, commercial, and military domains, a consideration of how player populations are 'reassembled' through social scientific data is a timely matter for communication scholars. This paper describes a large-scale study of virtual worlds in which participants were recruited at public gaming events, as opposed to through online means, and explores the dynamic relationships between p…
Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking relations between technology and educational theory
Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas tra…
Girls@Play: An ethnographic study of gender and digital gameplay
This paper reports on findings from a three-year, Canadian federally funded research project entitled “Education, Gender and Gaming” in which we documented the play practices of girls and boys playing console-based games. We show, in particular, how many of the presumptions and assumptions about “girls playing games” simply do not hold over time, or given a particular context. We therefore attempt to show how our research practices and methodolog…
Women@Work: Listening to gendered relations of power in teachers' talk about new technologies
This article examines teachers' working identities, focusing on gender inequities among teachers, within the school system, and in society, especially in relation to their competence with and use of computers. It highlights some of the less obvious tensions that are central to the work of teaching in relation to these new technologies, paying explicit attention to the gender inequities that continue to structure our understandings of both teachin…
Girl talk”: Gender, equity, and identity discourses in a school-based computer culture
Object Lessons: Towards an Educational Theory of Technology
This article offers a critical consideration of current initiatives, and concomitant discourses, exhorting educators to adopt and integrate digital tools on a large scale. Despite immense obstacles standing in the way of full-scale implementation, educational perspectives critical of the e-learning imperative are, for the most part, marginalized and/or ignored, as economic interests are prioritized over more specifically educational ones, and a n…
Who Cares? Gender And Welfare Regimes
Journal Article Who Cares? Gender And Welfare Regimes Get access JANE JENSON JANE JENSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 4, Issue 2, Summer 1997, Pages 182–187, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/4.2.182 Published: 01 July 1997
The Entrepreneurial Gamer: Regendering the Order of Play
The designation "gamer" is structurally bound to networked economies of digital play that are rewarded fiscally, socially, and publically, an order of play that is proving difficult to overturn. That girls and women have enjoyed at best marginal positions within video game cultures is by now well recognized, yet at the very same time is too easily dismissed in light of persuasively documented increases in the numbers of women who play. This artic…
Girls@Play: An ethnographic study of gender and digital gameplay
This paper reports on findings from a three-year, Canadian federally funded research project entitled “Education, Gender and Gaming” in which we documented the play practices of girls and boys playing console-based games. We show, in particular, how many of the presumptions and assumptions about “girls playing games” simply do not hold over time, or given a particular context. We therefore attempt to show how our research practices and methodolog…
Girl talk”: Gender, equity, and identity discourses in a school-based computer culture
Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings
As research on virtual worlds gains increasing attention in educational, commercial, and military domains, a consideration of how player populations are 'reassembled' through social scientific data is a timely matter for communication scholars. This paper describes a large-scale study of virtual worlds in which participants were recruited at public gaming events, as opposed to through online means, and explores the dynamic relationships between p…
Introduction: Some Consequences of Economic and Political Restructuring and Readjustment
Journal Article Introduction: Some Consequences of Economic and Political Restructuring and Readjustment Get access JANE JENSON JANE JENSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 1996, Pages 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/3.1.1 Published: 01 March 1996
Authorship and professional digital presence in feminist blogs
This research traces the shift from stand-alone, personal blogging toward professionalized use of social media. To exemplify this process, we draw attention to the transition from pseudonymous to identifiable authorship in feminist blogging. This transition toward professional digital presence is important for two major reasons: first, it reveals how oppositional politics is part of the commercial circuits and neoliberal market logics of identity…
Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking relations between technology and educational theory
Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas tra…
Women@Work: Listening to gendered relations of power in teachers' talk about new technologies
This article examines teachers' working identities, focusing on gender inequities among teachers, within the school system, and in society, especially in relation to their competence with and use of computers. It highlights some of the less obvious tensions that are central to the work of teaching in relation to these new technologies, paying explicit attention to the gender inequities that continue to structure our understandings of both teachin…
Playing With Our Selves: Multiplicity and identity in online gaming
As more of our lives are spent online, often in environments in which we interact with others through virtual characters (“avatars”), there remains a gulf between how player practices are documented and theorized, and the complex gendered identity work players actually carry out. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), with a sample of 359 players and 659 avatars that compares male a…
Alienated Playbour: Relations of Production in EVE Online
This article explores the play practices of EVE Online industrialists: those primarily responsible for generating the materials and equipment that drive the game's robust economy. Applying the concept of "immaterial labor" to this underattended aspect of the EVE community, we consider the range of communicative and informational artifacts and activities industrialists enact in support of their involvement in the game-work that happens both in gam…
Patriarchy in play: Video games as gendered media ecologies
Videogames are a dominant cultural, economic and creative medium in the twenty-first century, whose varied ecologies are increasingly recognized as particularly hostile environments to those identifying or identified as women. These ecologies include those encoded and enacted within the virtual environments of digital games, across the spectrum of those ecologies materially inhabited in games education, game cultures and, paradigmatically, the vi…
Pathways to sustainable futures: A “production pedagogy” model for STEM education
Mis/Representations in School-Based Digital Media Production: An Ethnographic Exploration with Muslim Girls
In this article, the authors discuss findings from a digital media production club with racialized girls in a low-income school in Toronto, Ontario. Specifically, the authors consider how student-produced media is impacted by ongoing postcolonial structures relating to power and representation in the school and in the media production work of Muslim and other racialized girls. From this standpoint, the authors interrogate how technological tools …
Making in schools: Student Learning Through an E-Textiles Curriculum
Making and maker spaces have attracted increasing attention as potential sites for supporting K-12 student learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and as a means of competency development for computational and design thinking as well as technological literacy. While interest in making and maker spaces is high, little empirical research has been conducted that evaluates student learning through making in K-12 classroom…
(En)gendering videogame development: A feminist approach to gender, education, and game studies
Over the past 10 years there has been growing recognition that digital media like movies, video games, and social networking technologies are changing the way we think about teaching and learning
Citizenship: Latin American Perspectives
Journal Article Citizenship: Latin American Perspectives Get access CATHY BLACKLOCK, CATHY BLACKLOCK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar JANE JENSON JANE JENSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 5, Issue 2, Summer 1998, Pages 127–131, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/5.2.127 Published: 01 July 1998
Introduction: Some Consequences of Economic and Political Restructuring and Readjustment
Journal Article Introduction: Some Consequences of Economic and Political Restructuring and Readjustment Get access JANE JENSON JANE JENSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 1996, Pages 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/3.1.1 Published: 01 March 1996
Who Cares? Gender And Welfare Regimes
Journal Article Who Cares? Gender And Welfare Regimes Get access JANE JENSON JANE JENSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 4, Issue 2, Summer 1997, Pages 182–187, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/4.2.182 Published: 01 July 1997
Citizenship: Latin American Perspectives
Journal Article Citizenship: Latin American Perspectives Get access CATHY BLACKLOCK, CATHY BLACKLOCK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar JANE JENSON JANE JENSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 5, Issue 2, Summer 1998, Pages 127–131, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/5.2.127 Published: 01 July 1998
Object Lessons: Towards an Educational Theory of Technology
This article offers a critical consideration of current initiatives, and concomitant discourses, exhorting educators to adopt and integrate digital tools on a large scale. Despite immense obstacles standing in the way of full-scale implementation, educational perspectives critical of the e-learning imperative are, for the most part, marginalized and/or ignored, as economic interests are prioritized over more specifically educational ones, and a n…
Women@Work: Listening to gendered relations of power in teachers' talk about new technologies
This article examines teachers' working identities, focusing on gender inequities among teachers, within the school system, and in society, especially in relation to their competence with and use of computers. It highlights some of the less obvious tensions that are central to the work of teaching in relation to these new technologies, paying explicit attention to the gender inequities that continue to structure our understandings of both teachin…
Girl talk”: Gender, equity, and identity discourses in a school-based computer culture
Girls@Play: An ethnographic study of gender and digital gameplay
This paper reports on findings from a three-year, Canadian federally funded research project entitled “Education, Gender and Gaming” in which we documented the play practices of girls and boys playing console-based games. We show, in particular, how many of the presumptions and assumptions about “girls playing games” simply do not hold over time, or given a particular context. We therefore attempt to show how our research practices and methodolog…
Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings
As research on virtual worlds gains increasing attention in educational, commercial, and military domains, a consideration of how player populations are 'reassembled' through social scientific data is a timely matter for communication scholars. This paper describes a large-scale study of virtual worlds in which participants were recruited at public gaming events, as opposed to through online means, and explores the dynamic relationships between p…
Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking relations between technology and educational theory
Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas tra…
Gaming Experience and Spatial Learning in a Virtual Morris Water Maze
Experience playing video games has been associated with perceptual and cognitive improvements (e.g., Castel, Pratt, & Drummond, 2005; Boot, Kramer, Simons, Fabiani, & Gratton, 2008; Colzato, van den Wildenberg, & Hommel, 2013; Oei & Patterson, 2013) For instance, video gamers show superior spatial abilities than non-gamers (Greenfield, Graig, & Lohr, 1994; Feng, Spence, and Pratt, 2007; Green & Bavelier, 2003). Given that such abilities have been…
Mis/Representations in School-Based Digital Media Production: An Ethnographic Exploration with Muslim Girls
In this article, the authors discuss findings from a digital media production club with racialized girls in a low-income school in Toronto, Ontario. Specifically, the authors consider how student-produced media is impacted by ongoing postcolonial structures relating to power and representation in the school and in the media production work of Muslim and other racialized girls. From this standpoint, the authors interrogate how technological tools …
Playing With Our Selves: Multiplicity and identity in online gaming
As more of our lives are spent online, often in environments in which we interact with others through virtual characters (“avatars”), there remains a gulf between how player practices are documented and theorized, and the complex gendered identity work players actually carry out. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), with a sample of 359 players and 659 avatars that compares male a…
Alienated Playbour: Relations of Production in EVE Online
This article explores the play practices of EVE Online industrialists: those primarily responsible for generating the materials and equipment that drive the game's robust economy. Applying the concept of "immaterial labor" to this underattended aspect of the EVE community, we consider the range of communicative and informational artifacts and activities industrialists enact in support of their involvement in the game-work that happens both in gam…
Virtually Together: Examining Pre-Existing Relationships in MMOG Play
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have been a fruitful venue to study social interactions ranging from small temporary groups, to larger more permanent in-game social collectives such as guilds or clans. Much of this literature is focused on strangers becoming friends through MMOG play; comparatively, little is known about gameplay-based interactions between pre-existing romantic couples. To address that gap, this paper describes the met…
Levelling Up: Minors' Play in a Closed-system MMOG
In this paper, we present a study of 182 youths (ages 9 - 17) playing a closed-system Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), Guardian Academy. Its purpose was to investigate the online virtual world behaviours of youth under the age of 18 playing in an educational setting. We report on a mixed-methods study of minor players in situ across eight socioeconomically diversified educational communities, focused on characteristics, patterns, and tra…
Canadian Indie Games Between the Global and the Local
Background Independent or “indie” games play a significant role in the contemporary game industry, and Canada is home to several prominent hubs of indie gaming activity. Analysis Drawing on 34 interviews with developers and community organizers across the country, this article examines how Canadian indie game developers construct their identities and communities on three levels: global, national, and local. Conclusions and Implications While onli…
(En)gendering videogame development: A feminist approach to gender, education, and game studies
Over the past 10 years there has been growing recognition that digital media like movies, video games, and social networking technologies are changing the way we think about teaching and learning
Challenges with Measuring Learning through Digital Gameplay in K-12 Classrooms
Videogames have long been lauded for their potential to increase engagement and enhance learning when used in classrooms. At the same time, how to best evaluate learning presents challenges, especially when the game does not have standardized assessments built-into it and when games are taken up in a wide variety of ways in quite diverse contexts. This article details the use of a geography game to support learning in 32 diverse classrooms in Ont…
Authorship and professional digital presence in feminist blogs
This research traces the shift from stand-alone, personal blogging toward professionalized use of social media. To exemplify this process, we draw attention to the transition from pseudonymous to identifiable authorship in feminist blogging. This transition toward professional digital presence is important for two major reasons: first, it reveals how oppositional politics is part of the commercial circuits and neoliberal market logics of identity…
The Entrepreneurial Gamer: Regendering the Order of Play
The designation "gamer" is structurally bound to networked economies of digital play that are rewarded fiscally, socially, and publically, an order of play that is proving difficult to overturn. That girls and women have enjoyed at best marginal positions within video game cultures is by now well recognized, yet at the very same time is too easily dismissed in light of persuasively documented increases in the numbers of women who play. This artic…
Literature @ the Speed of Thought: Hypertext and Tristram Shandy
Readers of Tristram Shandy are prepared early on for the extraordinary journey they are about to begin—a journey hosted by Tristram himself, a man whose purpose is to tell his life’s story without
Pathways to sustainable futures: A “production pedagogy” model for STEM education
Twittering Research, Calling Out and Canceling Cultures: A Story and Some Questions
This is an analysis of how Twitter played a significant, agentive and accountable role in the difficult birth and premature unravelling of a government-funded international feminist research network. We situate this case study and this process of initiation and annihilation within the broader context within which social media platforms are a critical site of intensive affective discursive practices through which individual and institutional reput…
Making in schools: Student Learning Through an E-Textiles Curriculum
Making and maker spaces have attracted increasing attention as potential sites for supporting K-12 student learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and as a means of competency development for computational and design thinking as well as technological literacy. While interest in making and maker spaces is high, little empirical research has been conducted that evaluates student learning through making in K-12 classroom…
Patriarchy in play: Video games as gendered media ecologies
Videogames are a dominant cultural, economic and creative medium in the twenty-first century, whose varied ecologies are increasingly recognized as particularly hostile environments to those identifying or identified as women. These ecologies include those encoded and enacted within the virtual environments of digital games, across the spectrum of those ecologies materially inhabited in games education, game cultures and, paradigmatically, the vi…
Sociology (23 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Political science (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Digital Games and Media (11 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Pedagogy (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)