Jack Denham
Biographic Data
| ID | 97238 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jack Denham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jack |
| FAMILY NAME | Denham |
| SIGNATURE | DENHAM J |
| AFFILIATIONS | York St John University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2539-8292 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
I wasn’t me, grieving in my room. I was Spiderman’: Gaming, loss and self-care following Covid-19
Building on Stroebe and Schut’s (1999) ‘dual process model’ (DPM), this paper draws on data from a survey of young people who identify as regular gamers (n=450) and semi-structured follow-up interviews (n=20) to understand video games as a form of self-care, and the positive and problematic encounters gamers experience in relation to immersion and escapism. The work is situated in relation to game/leisure studies, and extant research on different…
Into the meme stream: The value and spectacle of Internet memes
This article ‘tracks’ memes, forms of networked, pictorial/caption humour and social commentary – as well as cultural labour, through a process of value change: the ‘meme stream’. This is a process of incorporation of cultural resistance and labour into, and by, the dominant forces of capital that facilitate them: social media networks and their advertisers. We use Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance alongside Debord’s Spectacle to argue that as memes…
You Feel Like You've Found a Place Where You Belong: Symbolic Interactionism and Online Social Video Games in the Age of Covid-19
This paper investigates how players perceive and understand the sociality afforded by online social video games (OSGs), framed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing data from semi-structured interviews ( n = 20), we apply Blumer's concept of symbolic interactionism to explore the ways in which video games take on new meanings in co-constructed, collaborative and contributory digital spaces. We argue (a) that games offer a meaningful social experien…
Dark Destinations: Crime and Contemporary Tourism
From the Alcatraz East Crime Museum and Jack the Ripper guided tours to the Phnom Penh killing fields, ‘dark tourism’ is now a multi-million-pound global industry. Even in the most pleasant tourist destinations, underlying harms are constantly perpetuated, affecting both consumers and those who work or live around such tourist hotspots. Highlighting 50 travel destinations across six continents, expert criminologists, psychologists and historians …
Little data: Negotiating the ‘new normal’ with idiosyncratic and incomplete datasets
In this paper we make a case for ‘Little Data’, which is real-time, self-collected, idiosyncratic datasets maintained by individuals about themselves on myriad topics. We develop and offer a methodology for combining these messy, highly personal insights, to make deductive observations about collective practices. In testing this approach, we use the case study of the 2020–21 stay-at-home orders imposed in the U.S.A., U.K., and Western Europe duri…
Collecting the dead: Art, antique and ‘aura’ in personal collections of murderabilia
Murderabilia (murder-memorabilia) has enjoyed increasing tabloid attention over the past two-decades. It follows a sustained appetite for the consumption or more ‘mainstream’ forms of crime and death-based culture, yet has not been explored in a dedicated academic study. Building on work in this journal that has considered dead criminals, the consumption of corpses more generally, or the way that we ‘play’ with death in popular culture – this pap…
The right to the virtual city: Rural retreatism in open-world video games
This article uses Lefebvre’s spatial triad and his concept of The Right to the City to categorise open-world video games as contested virtual spatial experiences, interconnected with the non-virtual spaces in which they are produced and played and replete with the same spatial, capital forces of alienation to be negotiated and maintained. We use qualitative gameplay data ( n = 15), unpacking players’ journeys through Lefebvre’s conceived, lived a…
The reification of structural violence in video games
The Grand Theft Auto franchise features prominently within existing research exploring graphic, virtual, lawless, and damagingly realistic interpersonal violence within video games. Following a review of this literature, we empirically interrogate notions of the ‘realistic’ and the ‘violent’ during gameplay, finding that the undertones of systemic, structural, capitalistic violence are experienced by players as providing the gritty sense of the ‘…
Developing Interactive Elicitation: Social Desirability Bias and Capturing Play
Drawing on research from a mixed-methods project on gaming we argue for a qualitative methodological approach called “interactive elicitation,” a form of data collection that combines elements of photo elicitation, interviewing and vignettes. After situating our broader research project exploring young people’s experiences of violent open-world video games, we outline the process of conducting interactive elicitation, arguing for a mixed-methods …
Thinking Outside the ‘Murder Box: Virtual Violence and Pro-social Action in Video Games
The 'murder box' is a virtual, lawless space where anything goes. According to Atkinson and Rodgers, when debauched and hedonistic experiences are combed-out of our everyday lives as society ascends a gradual arc of civility, voyeuristic, pleasure-seekers can live out their violent, sadistic fantasies. Atkinson and Rodgers apply this popular criminological metanarrative, rooted in Freud, Elias and Presdee, to violence in gaming. In the context of…
The commodification of the criminal corpse: ‘Selective Memory’ in Posthumous Representations of Criminal
For the last 20 years, you have been able to buy body parts of criminals on the Internet. Through repeated exposure to the corpse in popular culture, the boundaries between real and facsimile are blurring when it comes to the cadaver, but ‘murderabilia’, a consumeristic arm of ‘dark tourism’, is often sold as the most authentic way to consume crime in the culture industry. Foltyn argues that in the process of consuming death, we are ‘creating cor…
Digital culture industry: A history of digital distribution
Thinking Outside the ‘Murder Box: Virtual Violence and Pro-social Action in Video Games
The 'murder box' is a virtual, lawless space where anything goes. According to Atkinson and Rodgers, when debauched and hedonistic experiences are combed-out of our everyday lives as society ascends a gradual arc of civility, voyeuristic, pleasure-seekers can live out their violent, sadistic fantasies. Atkinson and Rodgers apply this popular criminological metanarrative, rooted in Freud, Elias and Presdee, to violence in gaming. In the context of…
Into the meme stream: The value and spectacle of Internet memes
This article ‘tracks’ memes, forms of networked, pictorial/caption humour and social commentary – as well as cultural labour, through a process of value change: the ‘meme stream’. This is a process of incorporation of cultural resistance and labour into, and by, the dominant forces of capital that facilitate them: social media networks and their advertisers. We use Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance alongside Debord’s Spectacle to argue that as memes…
The right to the virtual city: Rural retreatism in open-world video games
This article uses Lefebvre’s spatial triad and his concept of The Right to the City to categorise open-world video games as contested virtual spatial experiences, interconnected with the non-virtual spaces in which they are produced and played and replete with the same spatial, capital forces of alienation to be negotiated and maintained. We use qualitative gameplay data ( n = 15), unpacking players’ journeys through Lefebvre’s conceived, lived a…
Developing Interactive Elicitation: Social Desirability Bias and Capturing Play
Drawing on research from a mixed-methods project on gaming we argue for a qualitative methodological approach called “interactive elicitation,” a form of data collection that combines elements of photo elicitation, interviewing and vignettes. After situating our broader research project exploring young people’s experiences of violent open-world video games, we outline the process of conducting interactive elicitation, arguing for a mixed-methods …
The reification of structural violence in video games
The Grand Theft Auto franchise features prominently within existing research exploring graphic, virtual, lawless, and damagingly realistic interpersonal violence within video games. Following a review of this literature, we empirically interrogate notions of the ‘realistic’ and the ‘violent’ during gameplay, finding that the undertones of systemic, structural, capitalistic violence are experienced by players as providing the gritty sense of the ‘…
I wasn’t me, grieving in my room. I was Spiderman’: Gaming, loss and self-care following Covid-19
Building on Stroebe and Schut’s (1999) ‘dual process model’ (DPM), this paper draws on data from a survey of young people who identify as regular gamers (n=450) and semi-structured follow-up interviews (n=20) to understand video games as a form of self-care, and the positive and problematic encounters gamers experience in relation to immersion and escapism. The work is situated in relation to game/leisure studies, and extant research on different…
You Feel Like You've Found a Place Where You Belong: Symbolic Interactionism and Online Social Video Games in the Age of Covid-19
This paper investigates how players perceive and understand the sociality afforded by online social video games (OSGs), framed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing data from semi-structured interviews ( n = 20), we apply Blumer's concept of symbolic interactionism to explore the ways in which video games take on new meanings in co-constructed, collaborative and contributory digital spaces. We argue (a) that games offer a meaningful social experien…
Digital culture industry: A history of digital distribution
The commodification of the criminal corpse: ‘Selective Memory’ in Posthumous Representations of Criminal
For the last 20 years, you have been able to buy body parts of criminals on the Internet. Through repeated exposure to the corpse in popular culture, the boundaries between real and facsimile are blurring when it comes to the cadaver, but ‘murderabilia’, a consumeristic arm of ‘dark tourism’, is often sold as the most authentic way to consume crime in the culture industry. Foltyn argues that in the process of consuming death, we are ‘creating cor…
Thinking Outside the ‘Murder Box: Virtual Violence and Pro-social Action in Video Games
The 'murder box' is a virtual, lawless space where anything goes. According to Atkinson and Rodgers, when debauched and hedonistic experiences are combed-out of our everyday lives as society ascends a gradual arc of civility, voyeuristic, pleasure-seekers can live out their violent, sadistic fantasies. Atkinson and Rodgers apply this popular criminological metanarrative, rooted in Freud, Elias and Presdee, to violence in gaming. In the context of…
The reification of structural violence in video games
The Grand Theft Auto franchise features prominently within existing research exploring graphic, virtual, lawless, and damagingly realistic interpersonal violence within video games. Following a review of this literature, we empirically interrogate notions of the ‘realistic’ and the ‘violent’ during gameplay, finding that the undertones of systemic, structural, capitalistic violence are experienced by players as providing the gritty sense of the ‘…
Developing Interactive Elicitation: Social Desirability Bias and Capturing Play
Drawing on research from a mixed-methods project on gaming we argue for a qualitative methodological approach called “interactive elicitation,” a form of data collection that combines elements of photo elicitation, interviewing and vignettes. After situating our broader research project exploring young people’s experiences of violent open-world video games, we outline the process of conducting interactive elicitation, arguing for a mixed-methods …
Collecting the dead: Art, antique and ‘aura’ in personal collections of murderabilia
Murderabilia (murder-memorabilia) has enjoyed increasing tabloid attention over the past two-decades. It follows a sustained appetite for the consumption or more ‘mainstream’ forms of crime and death-based culture, yet has not been explored in a dedicated academic study. Building on work in this journal that has considered dead criminals, the consumption of corpses more generally, or the way that we ‘play’ with death in popular culture – this pap…
The right to the virtual city: Rural retreatism in open-world video games
This article uses Lefebvre’s spatial triad and his concept of The Right to the City to categorise open-world video games as contested virtual spatial experiences, interconnected with the non-virtual spaces in which they are produced and played and replete with the same spatial, capital forces of alienation to be negotiated and maintained. We use qualitative gameplay data ( n = 15), unpacking players’ journeys through Lefebvre’s conceived, lived a…
Little data: Negotiating the ‘new normal’ with idiosyncratic and incomplete datasets
In this paper we make a case for ‘Little Data’, which is real-time, self-collected, idiosyncratic datasets maintained by individuals about themselves on myriad topics. We develop and offer a methodology for combining these messy, highly personal insights, to make deductive observations about collective practices. In testing this approach, we use the case study of the 2020–21 stay-at-home orders imposed in the U.S.A., U.K., and Western Europe duri…
Dark Destinations: Crime and Contemporary Tourism
From the Alcatraz East Crime Museum and Jack the Ripper guided tours to the Phnom Penh killing fields, ‘dark tourism’ is now a multi-million-pound global industry. Even in the most pleasant tourist destinations, underlying harms are constantly perpetuated, affecting both consumers and those who work or live around such tourist hotspots. Highlighting 50 travel destinations across six continents, expert criminologists, psychologists and historians …
I wasn’t me, grieving in my room. I was Spiderman’: Gaming, loss and self-care following Covid-19
Building on Stroebe and Schut’s (1999) ‘dual process model’ (DPM), this paper draws on data from a survey of young people who identify as regular gamers (n=450) and semi-structured follow-up interviews (n=20) to understand video games as a form of self-care, and the positive and problematic encounters gamers experience in relation to immersion and escapism. The work is situated in relation to game/leisure studies, and extant research on different…
Into the meme stream: The value and spectacle of Internet memes
This article ‘tracks’ memes, forms of networked, pictorial/caption humour and social commentary – as well as cultural labour, through a process of value change: the ‘meme stream’. This is a process of incorporation of cultural resistance and labour into, and by, the dominant forces of capital that facilitate them: social media networks and their advertisers. We use Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance alongside Debord’s Spectacle to argue that as memes…
You Feel Like You've Found a Place Where You Belong: Symbolic Interactionism and Online Social Video Games in the Age of Covid-19
This paper investigates how players perceive and understand the sociality afforded by online social video games (OSGs), framed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing data from semi-structured interviews ( n = 20), we apply Blumer's concept of symbolic interactionism to explore the ways in which video games take on new meanings in co-constructed, collaborative and contributory digital spaces. We argue (a) that games offer a meaningful social experien…
Sociology (9 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Digital Games and Media (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Criminology (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works)