Each year IRDL hosts an open house, a speaker series, cross-departmental collaborative events, and supportive writing groups for graduate students and faculty members.
We are committed to providing space and support for research development and dissemination.
In July 2025, following a campaign by the Australian anti-pornography organization Collective Shout and ensuing pressure from payment processors including Mastercard, Visa, PayPal and Stripe, videogame distribution platforms Steam and http://itch.io updated their policies on sexual content to align with payment processor expectations. While the policies may seem like common sense to some, they stand to curtail diverse sexual expression, efface sexual subcultures, and deplatform a wide range of sexual content.
Join us for a roundtable discussion with advocates, designers, and game and sexuality scholars who will historicize and contextualize this emerging issue through a discussion of the role of affect in anti-pornography movements; payment processors’ power in shaping the internet; conservative movements and censorship; the impact of censorship on LGBTQ+ communities and sexual health education; and sexual videogames as a neglected archive.
This event is sponsored by the Canadian Game Studies Association and co-hosted by The Institute for Research on Digital Literacies (IRDL), in collaboration with The Institute for Technoscience & Society (ITS), Sensorium, and The Center for Feminist Research (CFR).
Panellists
Ashley ML Guajardo, Assistant Arts Professor, NYU Game Center, New York University
Jean Ketterling, Assistant Professor, Political Studies – Women’s and Gender Studies Program, University of Saskatchewan.
Val Webber, postdoctoral fellow, Sexual Health and Gender Research (SHaG Lab), Dalhousie University
Caroline Bem, Assistant Professor in the Department of literatures and languages of the world at Université de Montréal.
Kenzie Gordon, PhD Candidate, Digital Humanities and Media & Cultural Studies, University of Alberta
Ana Valens, journalist specializing in queer and adult content censorship, as well as an activist against the online censorship of sex workers and adult content creators
Join us
Time and Date: Thursday, October 2, 2025 @ 12-2pm EST
Event format: This is an online event.
Register here: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/2HbNny3JT3uvRMwD7jSEug
Print the posterPrint and distribute to your network:
|
Share the inviteClick the image to share with your network:
|
