3/26/25

7pm-9pm

Virtual: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82751526647 - Meeting ID: 827 5152 6647

In this talk, Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum ("Tess") theorizes an emancipatory design practice intended to restore agency and power to those of us who have suffered at the hands of the oppressive normative social order (which is to say, most of us). She illustrates this new practice with a vulnerable autoethnographic discussion of her own experiences of gender transition, and with examples from larp, tabletop roleplaying games, and popular media, situating these examples within an interdisciplinary crossroads of theories and perspectives from psychology, media studies, and design. Her wide ranging talk puts avant garde filmmaker and anthropologist Maya Deren's writing about Balinese witchcraft in the 1940s in conversation with black feminist poet and scholar Audre Lorde, transgender game designer Avery Alder, larp designer and theorist Jonaya Kemper, and digital learning theorists Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiulo, all in service of a new mode of design that is indistinguishable from magical practice and activism.

Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess” – she/fae) is a songwriter, scholar, speaker, poet, performer, storyteller, game designer, artist, activist, and practicing witch. Fae recently left a tenured position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine where she was a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. Her most recent book on Playful Wearable Technologies, co-authored with Katherine Isbister, Elena Marquez-Segura, Ella Dagan, and Oguz Burak, was released by The MIT Press in early 2024. Her most recent album, Emotional Regulation, released under the artist name Moth Mother in October 2024, was written in response to the proliferation of anti-LGBTQ+ policies around the globe.