Kate Ringland, PhD

Tag: disability (Page 1 of 2)

finding access to playful online communities, partial image of a phone with social media app icons

SCMS 2022: The Serious Business of Accessibility in Playful Community Spaces

April 6, 2022 / / 0 Comments

This is a summary of the work presented at SCMS 2022. This is cross-posted on Medium: https://medium.com/p/d8ebbe436fa2

Play happens everywhere and is a universal human experience. However, questions of accessibility still challenge many playful spaces. As diverse as people are, there are a diverse set of needs in order to access an activity, interaction, or experience. We find, though, that disabled individuals are often not accommodated in playful places.

I turn particularly to online playful spaces where some disabled people may find the primary source of their interactions. These online spaces become community places, where people with like-interests congregate, form relationships, and have fun. For playful communities, creating access means both grappling with platform design, including appropriation and modification of technology, and iterating on community norms and expectations to accommodate community members.

In this presentation, using data from ethnographies from two different playful communities, I will explore how the platform and community values are entangled and impact not only the playfulness, but also the accessibility of the space [3,6].

Methods

For both the case studies used in this work, I used ethnographic methods where I was embedded as a participant observer in the community for an extended period of time. In each community, I collected data from my own observations, public social media content, and community produced content. This work is qualitative and while I use some mixed methods, such as surveys, I mostly use that to triangulate what I am already finding in my qualitative work. This means that this work goes very deep into some community spaces and narrows in on specific aspects of my work. In order to preserve the safety of the community members, everything is paraphrased, abstracted, or anonymized as appropriate.

I identify as disabled scholar and activist, which means I approach most of my research with a critical disability lens. I look at spaces through a lens of deconstructing ableism that is occurring there, as well as trying to better understand communities from the perspective of making members feel safe, included, and cared for.

Autcraft

The first ethnography was conducted in a community centered around the video game Minecraft — Autcraft — was founded to create a safe space for autistic youth [5]. The Autcraft community uses various methods including modifying game software, leveraging other social media platforms, and adhering to a strict code of conduct for members to address not only the needs of autistic youth, but to accommodate other access needs [3].

The Autcraft community uses a variety of technological platforms in their community, but it is centered around the video game Minecraft. They use plug-ins and modifications to the software in order to make the game more accessible for the players. There are many different ways the community creates “access” through technological means and many of these technological implementations have been iterated on over time.

a screenshot of a Minecraft world with a person’s avatar centered in the middle of the screen. In the lower left corner is a large semi-transparent overlay of the text chat. The text in the box is white and close together.

The majority of communication in the game world happens via text or through avatar interactions, which are quite simplified compared to some other multiplayer games. This was another intentional choice by the community. If the text in the image above were happening live, it could be moving up the screen fairly quickly. While this is still preferred to other modes of communication, it has its challenges and takes some getting used to.

A text chat where the lines are spaced apart by dashes and the title are in different colors, one player’s name is highlighted in yellow.

After learning of a player in the community who was losing their vision, they added a new plug-in to the game in order to make the text chat more accessible. Now the different lines are separated by a symbol of the players choice, such as the dash. Specific titles and the player’s name is also highlighted in different colors. In making this change, the community ended up making text chat more accessible for many of the players.

The reason many people join the Autcraft community is because they had difficulty fitting in, finding friends, or, more broadly speaking, getting access to the play in a Minecraft space. Therefore, for many on Autcraft, being helpful and supportive is one of the most important parts of their sociality. The community has found it important enough to write into their rules and actively encourages this behavior through rewards, such as special titles such as member of the week.

Community describe hanging out with their friends on the Autcraft community much in the same way other youth online have. They spend time with their Autcraft friends online by interacting through forums, instant messaging, and “hanging out” in the Autcraft virtual world. And although not typically physically collocated, these youth on Autcraft consider these relationships to be meaningful friendships.

BTS’s ARMY

The second, ongoing ethnography is being conducted within the ARMY community, the fandom for the Korean musicians, BTS [4]. Much like the Autcraft community, the ARMY community is global. Unlike the Autcraft community, ARMY is a community made of loose-ties and more porous boundaries for community membership [2]. Therefore, how the community engages in play and accommodates access needs of members is notably different from the Autcraft community, as there are no central individuals making decisions about accommodations.

BTS posing with their diplomatic passports in blue suits
BTS posing with their diplomatic passports that they received as envoys to South Korea’s president to attend and give a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2021.

Additionally, because ARMY tends to use public social media platforms, the amount of control they have over the technology is very different from Autcraft. One way the community creates access is by smaller sub-communities using whatever platforms work for them. Smaller groups of ARMY, then, might be found on a modified Discord server or in a group chat. BTS, and the band’s use of various social media platforms, might also dictate what platforms are the most popular among ARMY.

More often, the social infrastructure is altered and iterated upon in order to create access. Specialized accounts to create spaces for disabled or Deaf — or any other subgroup — exist to help foster support and push for more access. For example, as a disabled ARMY, I have been pushing for more alt text to be incorporated in community members’ posts on social media. This also means asking the social media platforms to create more access for users as well.

This sort of activity is important because much of ARMY’s play are fan edits, parody accounts, threads of music and videos, art, and commentary about BTS. In fact, ARMY and BTS often play together, each creating content, communicating via various social media platforms, and share the same goals. The play is very referential, often including layers of inside jokes. For example, there is a plethora of content that explicitly references BTS’s known love for chicken [1].

Selfie at a stadium with a woman with a purple face mask and purple shirt on next to a purple colored chicken badly photoshopped in
Selfie of me with the BTS ARMY chicken at the Permission to Dance On Stage concert in Los Angeles, CA in November 2021.

Like the Autcraft community, ARMY are mindful of social justice issues, especially with regard to access. In both communities, we see how play is both a playful activity, but also an important mechanism for more serious endeavors. This might look like an Autcraft member creating a series of YouTube videos of their game play as an anti-bullying campaign. Or this might be a member of ARMY creating a thread of edited BTS content to highlight the international sign the band used in their Permission to Dance video.

BTS dancing in Permission to Dance music video making "dance" sign
BTS doing the sign for “dance” in their Permission to Dance music video.

Both communities are also doing the work of correcting misconceptions and pushing back against stigma about themselves. These misconceptions occur because outsiders do not understand the community (often harboring sexism, misogyny, racism, and ableism towards both communities). Particularly, because these are communities of play, they are also often dismissed as ultimately inconsequential by outsiders. This is something both communities would vehemently protest, and do.

Creating Access to Play

Together, these studies show how communities leverage their playful qualities to appropriate and modify the technological and social make-up of the group in order to accommodate a diverse set of community members. From this, we are mostly left with more questions about “play” and “access.” Where is play taking place and can we support ideas of play for the sake of play at the same time play is also being used for more serious business? How is access being created in these various social spaces and what can communities do when they are at the mercy of the technology available to them?

In both communities, we see play being the platform for serious, even life-impacting, interests of community members (e.g., anti-bullying campaigns, grappling with both community-wide and individual trauma). With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, these communities became that much more important for its members, as they became the only means of socializing and forming relationships with people outside their homes and places of work. These playful communities were not just a place of leisure or a creative outlet. They are also a place to form meaningful connections with other people.

At the same time, these playful communities are addressing various questions of access. In this talk, I started to illuminate some of the ways communities accommodate disabled community members. The work these communities are doing should be noted because how communities play and what that play is doing for members of communities can be a starting point for understanding these otherwise marginalized groups.

And you can watch a pre-recorded version of the presentation here:

References

1. @bock_twt. 2020. Bantam Seoyeondon: BTS ARMY Shenanigans. In 2020 Rhizome Connect Virtual Conference and Convention. Retrieved September 5, 2021 from https://rhizomeconnect.com/2020/expo-hall/shenanigans/

2. So Yeon Park, Nicole Santero, Blair Kaneshiro, and Jin Ha Lee. 2021. Armed in ARMY: A Case Study of How BTS Fans Successfully Collaborated to #MatchAMillion for Black Lives Matter. CHI 2021: 14.

3. Kathryn E. Ringland. 2019. A Place to Play: The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300518

4. Kathryn E. Ringland, Arpita Bhattacharya, Kevin Weatherwax, Tessa Eagle, and Christine T. Wolf. 2022. ARMY’s Magic Shop: Understanding the Collaborative Construction of Playful Places in Online Communities. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

5. Kathryn E. Ringland, Christine T. Wolf, Heather Faucett, Lynn Dombrowski, and Gillian R. Hayes. 2016. “Will I always be not social?”: Re-Conceptualizing Sociality in the Context of a Minecraft Community for Autism. In CHI 2016.

6. Tanya Titchkosky. 2011. The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

News

Awarded UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship

May 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Amidst all the quarantine madness, I realize I hadn’t yet announced what I’ll be doing for work next year! I’ve been award the University of California President’s Postdoc for this coming year. I’ll be working at University of California Santa Cruz in the Computational Media Department.

The UC President’s Postdoc is awarded to a limited number of applicants each year with the hope of improving diversity within tenure track faculty ranks in the University of California system. For the 2020-2021 cohort, there were 1032 applicants and they offered 37 awards. I am extremely honored to have been chosen!

I am transitioning to this new position at the beginning of July and I’ll be working remotely for the present, but I’m looking forward to continuing my research with disabled folks, play, games, and equity! I’ll be posting more in the future both about my experiences on the job market thus far and my plans for future research projects. Stay tuned!

A photo of a close up of a banana slug, “looking” at the camera.
old computer monitor with black background, green text that reads "critical failure detected, do not panic.. do not panic... do not panic..."

Understanding Mental Ill-Health as Psychosocial Disability: Implications for Assistive Technology #ASSETS2019

October 25, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Preview: Psychosocial disabilities can be found in a large portion of the world’s population and consist of different disabilities including mental ill-health such as depression and anxiety. Psychosocial disabilities has been widely understudied in assistive technology research, but there is a great potential for assistive technology to be able to support people with psychosocial disabilities. Our investigation draws on interviews conducted with 18 people who have complex health needs that include mental ill-health. This work highlights the potential role for assistive technology in support psychosocial disability outside of a clinical or medical framework.

What are psychosocial disabilities?

Anxiety, depression, and many mental health concerns can be categorized under psychosocial disabilities, therefore, recognizing the actual or perceived impairments these concerns create in daily life. Importantly, a large portion of the population (1 in 4 worldwide) have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. This does not even consider those who have not been formally diagnosed because they have not sought diagnosis or meet the “threshold” for clinical definitions. Therefore, people with psychosocial disabilities make up a large portion of the world population.

There are a number of issues surrounding psychosocial disabilities that we address in this paper. First, many psychosocial disabilities are experienced alongside physical disabilities. However, a holistic approach to supporting these disabilities is widely underdeveloped and understudied. Medical care, for example, is widely siloed for different disabilities and health conditions with treatment for physical and mental health concerns happening separately. Second, while disabled people often face issues such as stigma or oppression, for those with psychosocial disabilities these issues are complicated by the invisibility and unique history of mental illness and health. As a result, to this day, many people are hesitant to disclose their psychosocial disability and the severity of the impact of their disability. Third, for the field of assistive technology, there has generally been greater attention to physical disabilities than psychosocial disabilities. Our investigation draws on interviews conducted with 18 people with complex health needs (such as having diabetes, heart conditions, or cancer) along with mental health concerns. Our results suggest that mental health symptoms are disabling for these individuals, as they disrupt a number of valued activities and roles. In addition, these disruptions often recur over time, and may be mutually reinforced by physical health symptoms. Yet, despite the challenges of mental health concerns, many individuals avoided medicalizing their mental health symptoms or discussing them explicitly as “disabilities.”

Overview of Study Results

After interviewing participants in our study we found three themes: (1) disabling experience of personal health, (2) how they talk about their personal health, and (3) how they care for their mental ill-health.

Disabling Experiences of Personal Health

Disabling experiences from personal health concerns occurred for our participants across their lives, from both their physical and mental ill-health. Specifically, they had to plan around some of their mental health concerns in order to continue living their lives. For example, one participant knew they would not be doing anything too intensive or stressful during the month of February because they will be upset or depressed during that time.

Taken together, their physical and mental health impacted their experiences of disability, often impacting one another. For example, a participant who was having difficulty walking without an assistive device found the lack of exercise was impacting his depression to her detriment. Being able to use her rollator to go for daily walks helped lessen the disabling impact of her depression.

Talking about Personal Health

The way participants talked about their personal health differed depending on if they were discussing their physical health or mental health. Much of physical health experiences were discussed in a matter-of-fact manner. They used things such as diagnostic labels and they didn’t provide contextual information or circumstances around the physical health issues. In contrast, for mental ill-health experiences, they had a spectrum of ways of framing their concerns. Some did not take up the diagnostic labels. For example, they might describe some symptoms of depression but then insist they do not actually have depression. Others found that the context and circumstances influenced whether they had a specific diagnostic label. For example, they might only be anxious because of their financial situation and not otherwise have anxiety. Partially because of these framings, participants would wait until their mental ill-health was severe or quite disabling before seeking help. These framings and discourse around their mental ill-health also influenced who they would talk to about their mental health concerns. This appeared to be related to worries about issues such as stigma. Some participants were careful which friends and family members they discussed mental health concerns with, while others were even hesitant about discussion with certain medical health providers. Consistently, participants thought carefully about the consequences of disclosing.

Caring for Mental Ill-health

While participants varied in how they thought about and discussed their mental ill-health, they also varied in the ways they took care of themselves with regards to mental health. Because of the broader framing around health, many participants relied on the healthcare system to support and care for their psychosocial disabilities. Participants had a range in how they felt about medication, with some taking medication for mental ill-health and others not wanting to “cover up” their problems with medication.

However, beyond the medical healthcare system, participants all used other self-management practices to help with their psychosocial disabilities. They discussed a broad range of skills including exercise, being social, meditating using applications, posting reminders for themselves in frequented spaces, and cognitive exercises such as thought restructuring (a common therapeutic tool). They used these tools in order to be able to participate in their daily lives.

Neon sign that says "breathe"

Call-to-Action for Assistive Technology Community

Viewing the whole person beyond the medical context.

Our findings indicate that the complex co-occurring nature of physical and psychosocial disability should be recognized, such that ill-health is viewed holistically. Such an understanding requires health professionals to gather and understand rich contextual information about individuals, as would likely occur through recurrent, engaged contact in which individuals can share their personal experience of their physical and psychosocial disabilities. Assistive technologies could support this interaction by facilitating documentation of patterns and experiences occurring outside of health appointments, potentially contributing to care providers’ understanding of lived experiences of both mental and physical ill-health, and their interrelationship, and informing clinical conversations that are more person-centered and responsive to impairments in daily life.

Knowing that stigma may also be a barrier to these conversations, technologies could aim to empower individuals to speak about their psychosocial disability within the health system and more broadly. In the physical health domain, some research has explored how individuals with invisible disabilities manage demands to repeatedly disclose their disability, as well as how this might impact the design of assistive technology. For example, assistive technology may help disclose or partially disclose a disability in order to help a person gain access or get support from people around them as needed (such as business cards explaining a psychosocial disability). In addition, technologies could support individuals gaining skills and experience relevant to disclosing a psychosocial disability. For example, through simulations of conversations with health providers, or by facilitating peer-to-peer communication so that individuals gain positive initial disclosure experiences that empower them to disclose further.

Reframe research and design to match user experiences.

Given the variety of ways that individuals with psychosocial disability use and view labels, and the numerous factors that influence these framings, designers of assistive technology must be mindful of how resulting tools are introduced to people. Framing in terms of “wellness,” for example, rather than mental ill-health or psychosocial disability may increase acceptability. It will also be important to frame technologies such that they appeal to individuals when they are not actively symptomatic, but when they might nonetheless maintain their good health through self-management. Within this exploration of framing, there is opportunity to meet individuals with disabilities where they are and find language and labels that work for them, rather than adopting a top down application of labels common in medicine. Future research might more directly investigate how individuals make decisions about adopting labels related to psychosocial disabilities and mental health diagnoses.

Moving away from a solely medical model of psychosocial disabilities.

Within the assistive technology community, tools to support those with psychosocial disability are rare. However, within behavioral science, interest in the use of technological tools to support mental ill-health is rapidly expanding. Digital mental health is the use of information and communication technologies to improve mental health. However, the majority of digital mental health tools are developed to address mental health concerns from a medical perspective (that is, a focus on psychopathology and symptom control). By viewing technology through this purely medical lens, designers may overlook opportunities for technologies to enhance other aspects of people’s lives. In order to find common ground in medical and social research and design for people with disabilities, we propose bringing the medical and assistive technology communities together to learn from each other. Adopting a view informed by a psychosocial disability model may suggest different outcomes of concern, centering the experiences and values of the disabled individual.

Researchers in medical fields, such as behavioral health, have done a great deal of work in creating support, tools, and care for individuals with psychosocial disabilities. And, in fact, some assistive technology has been based directly off this work. However, more work can be done to help merge a social model view of psychosocial disability with this work in medicalized fields. With a social lens, creating assistive technology for people with psychosocial disabilities can be supportive, empowering, and will re-center people with disabilities, allowing their experiences to be the catalyst of technological change.

handicap sign on pavement, dirty from road

For more details about methods and results, please read the full paper.

Kathryn E. Ringland, Jennifer Nicholas, Rachel Kornfield, Emily G Lattie, David C. Mohr, and Madhu C. Reddy. 2019. “Understanding Mental Ill-health as Psychosocial Disability: Implications for Assistive Technology.” In Proceedings of ASSETS 2019. [PDF]

A sunset over the tops of trees in minecraft.

“Do you work for Aperture Science?”: Researching and Finding the Gamer Identity in a Minecraft Community for Autistic Children at #FDG19

August 24, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Preview: For members of the Autcraft community, they are not only coming to terms with their identity as autistic individuals, but they are also playing with and practicing other identity roles. In this article, I briefly discuss the impact of the “gamer” identity. I also explore some possible implications for researchers who are interested in—or concerned about—games.

Disability and Play

Throughout history, disability has been a part of interactions and relationships in society as a way of creating the category of “other” and, therefore, ensuring the dominance of the category of “normal.” As an aspect of their life, a person’s disability seems all encompassing. This leaves little room for any other aspects of their identity or life. Not only is the person then defined by their inability to interact or engage in the world, but they are then not seen as having ability in anything. This includes those who play games. People with disabilities are seen as not able to play—or maybe not even interested in playing.

In this work I continue to analyze data from my virtual ethnography of the Autcraft community—a community for autistic kids who play Minecraft. You can read more about it here.

Background: Problematic Video Games?

There are a lot of concerns about video games, especially when it comes to children playing them. These concerns range from misbehavior, addiction, and bullying. This is especially true for autistic children. Many researchers have gone to great lengths to show the negative aspects of games for autistic people.

However, while many people don’t realize it, a lot of what is happening in these video games is a very social experience. As I have shown in my other work, the community members of Autcraft are playing with each other, making friends, and gaining confidence in their own social abilities.

Finding Identity

In this paper, I show how not only are the autistic community members of Autcraft embracing their identities as autistic people, they are also embracing and practicing the identity of “gamer.” They post to the forums about games, apply to be YouTube content creators, and embrace other aspects of nerdy game culture.

While they are trying on these different roles, this is complicated not only by their autism, but also by exploration of gender identity, among other roles. This is especially important given how hostile some gaming environments can be for those who are straight men. By focusing on one identity, it’s easy to lose sight of these other emerging aspects of the community members’ lives.

Implications for Research

There are two implications for research from this work.

  1. Promoting pro-social gaming. There has been a drive to understand the negative aspects of gaming, however less has been explored in the positive. Especially for individuals with disability or difficulty accessing other forms of sociality and play, games can be a great resource.
  2. Need for broader understanding of individual players. There is a need to look at players through an intersectional lens. Players are not only gamers (or not, depending whether they adopt this label or not), but also have varying ability and disability, gender identities and expressions, cultural and racial identities, and so on. By narrowing the scope too much, we sometimes will miss the important intersections of these identities and their impact on the person’s access to play (and social interactions).

For more details about our methods and findings, please see my paper that has been accepted to FDG 2019 (to appear in August 2019). Full citation and link to the pdf below:

Kathryn E. Ringland. 2019. “Do you work for Aperture Science?”: Researching and Finding the Gamer Identity in a Minecraft Community for Autistic Children. In FDG 2019. [PDF]

Acknowledgements: I thank the members of Autcraft for the warm welcome to their community. Thank you to Chris Wolf, Amanda Cullen, Severn Ringland, Kyle Lee, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on various iterations of this work. Special thanks to: Gillian Hayes, Tom Boellstorff, Mimi Ito, and Aaron Trammell. Thank you to Robert and Barbara Kleist for their support, as well as the ARCS Foundation. This work is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (T32MH115882). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. This work is covered by human subjects protocol #2014-1079 at the University of California, Irvine.

old computer monitor with black background, green text that reads "critical failure detected, do not panic.. do not panic... do not panic..."

Keeping Safe: Children Online with Social Media and Games

August 21, 2019 / / 0 Comments
Large statues of Minecraft characters stand on a hill in the game Minecraft.
Statues of the administrators in Autcraft, screen shot from my field work, 2014.

Content Warning: Discussion of child abuse, online harassment, ableism.

Cross-posted on Medium: https://medium.com/@kateringland/keeping-safe-children-online-with-social-media-and-games-9ca60c168cfa

Today, two different items crossed my twitter feed. First, there was an incident involving a player on Autcraft. Second, a research blog was published showing there is no link between the quantity of tech use and mental ill-health in adolescents. I’ve been thinking about both of these postings much of today and I wanted to share some thoughts with you.

Social media and multiplayer games (such as Minecraft that they play on Autcraft) are by design extremely social spaces. That’s the point of them, to interact with other people. This can be a boon, especially for people who are isolated for one reason or another. But, as with anything that has the human element, there can be darkness as well. Games and social media have had their fair share of citations for toxic behavior.

Autcraft was created as a safe haven for autistic children. For the vast majority of community members, it has worked — see any of my other research posts about it. But today, the story broke that it did not work for one child. This child was targeted by another member, who clearly joined the community for malevolent reasons. It’s horrible and tragic and, honestly, I’m continually horrified by the things people intentionally do to one another. Throughout history children have been the target of violent behavior, especially those who are marginalized. Online platforms have just given perpetrators a different means of finding their victims.

Research continues to show that it isn’t the platforms or the hardware (think screens) that causes a problem for youth (and adults even). What continues to be a problem is malevolent people.

So what can we do?

  1. Hold social media and games companies accountable for creating better safety features on their platforms. There’s still lots of room to grow here.
  2. We need more research to study how to keep kids safe in these online spaces, especially marginalized youth. For example, Autcraft is being forced to ban all private messaging between players because of this incident. Is this really the best way to assure player safety? We need more research to find out. This includes funding this research and having the human resources. This sort of work will not only take trained researchers (and/or researchers in training), but also community partners, such as the one I’ve been fortunate enough to have with the Autcraft community.
  3. Better educational sources for both parents and children. Social media literacy is inherently a part of online safety. Children need to understand who they are talking to in these online spaces. Parents need to know who their child is talking to and playing with. It’s okay to not fully understand a game, but basic literacy is essential. Children are playing in what are essentially digital 3-D spaces and feel very physical. Even if these children are never meeting other players offline, there can be real psychological harm.
  4. Create policy. I realize the current political climate is awful. But we need up to date policies to keep our privacy and safety a priority. Right now the tech companies are calling an awful lot of the shots and I promise they only care about the welfare of children if it’s impacting their bottom line. (Also see point 1). Policy can happen both locally and nationally. Call your representatives. Write letters. Run for office.

It’s going to take a village to keep our children safe on the internet. The answer is not to ban screens or games. There’s so much positive happening there. I just hope with a concerted effort we can make more safe spaces for our children to play.

Science Communication, Making Research Accessible to Everyone

‘Mock’ TV Interview

July 24, 2019 / / 0 Comments

For this week’s blog, I thought I would share my “mock” TV interview that I did through the RSG program at Medill School of Journalism. Over the next couple of blog posts, I plan on distilling some of the lessons I’ve learned about doing interviews and talk about my experiences – both with this TV interview and the podcast.

Sneak preview: you should have at most 3 core ideas or things you want people to remember no matter the kind of conversation or talk you are giving. If someone is at a BBQ tomorrow and telling other people about their conversation with you (or the talk they heard you give or the interview they heard of yours), what do you want them to be able to remember and relay?

Without further ado, here is my very first live-to-tape TV interview!

Science Communication, Making Research Accessible to Everyone

Xceptional Leaders Podcast: Guest Interview

July 15, 2019 / / 2 Comments

Recently, I was interviewed for the Xceptional Leaders podcast series. In a follow up blog, I will relate some of my experiences with that recording.

I recently gave an interview to the Xceptional Leaders podcast series. You can listen here or search for it on your podcast app of choice! “Social Research Related to Neurodiverse Gaming with Dr. Kathryn Ringland”

In this podcast I discuss my research with the Autcraft community. If you want to know more, I encourage you to read some of my blog posts!

If you would like to know more and get updates about my new nonprofit, the Kaina Institute for Equitable Research, please bookmark our website: https://www.kainainstitute.org/

Was there something I said in the podcast that got you curious? Please feel free to leave a comment here or tweet @liltove on Twitter or comment on my Facebook page!

A laptop keyboard with the keys reflected on the screen above. The keys are backlit with a green glow.
A sunset over the tops of trees in minecraft.

A Place to Play

April 10, 2019 / / 3 Comments

The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces

Preview: Play is an important part of childhood that is often inaccessible for children with disabilities. This work looks at how Autcraft, an online community for autistic children, uses different social media and games platforms to enable access to social play. First, the spaces the Autcraft community uses make the place that is Autcraft possible. Second, these spaces, though some of them are digital, are no more or less “real” than the physical spaces making up a schoolyard or playground.

Cross-posted on Medium.

Sunset in Minecraft.

Importance of Play

Social play is an important part of childhood. It is how children develop and practice their social skills. Children engage in a wide range of playful practice roles and test the boundaries of social rules. These playful interactions are vital not only for children to grow into competent, functioning adults, but also to discover who they are and what kind of adults they want to become.

Disabilities and Access to Play

Disability is created when a person is trying to interact with the world and are not accommodated by their environment. An example of this would be a child who wants to play on a playground, but they cannot roll their wheelchair into the space. Access and disability are inextricably linked. Access, in general, is not a given experience for any single individual. Disability is created in the moment that access is faulty or denied to a person. What this means is that disability is not created within a person.

Because a person’s body and their environment are constantly changing, disability is not happening all the time, but rather, a person is disabled by the context with which they are trying to engage. As disability scholar Tanya Titchkosky states, “While we all have bodies — bodies that we act, sense, feel, or move in and through — only some bodies, only some of the time and only in some places, are understood as disabled ones.” Access, therefore, is dynamic and ever shifting.

Accessibility signs in front of rough, grassy terrain.

For children with disabilities, including autistic children, access to play is often limited or of low quality. One way to help autistic children gain access to play and socialization is through online spaces, such as social media, games, and virtual worlds. This paper extends previous work in this area, by exploring the disabled experience and how that affects access to play.

Access is really only noticeable when it is not available and creates disability. The disabled body becomes the oppressed body, when they are denied access (advertently or inadvertently), not only in a social sense, but also in a literal, physical sense. Children who do not conform to “normal” and “normal play,” then, are not invited to the game. This is done both literally and through the making play objects that a disabled child cannot use.

Among other activities, individuals with disabilities use online spaces to socialize — empowering themselves to do what they may not be able to in the physical world. Online spaces have different ways of creating access from physical spaces. In this ethnographic work, I explore how one community uses the sense of place and the digital experience in Minecraft specifically to give autistic children access to play with their peers. In this sense, they are using Minecraft to mediate their play experience, just like a physical world playground mediates another kind of play experience. One type of mediated experience is not better (or less mediated) than another. Rather, these experiences, from face-to-face to text to avatars on a computer screen, are diverse kinds of experiences. Simply put, playing in Minecraft with friends is still social play, even though it might look different from playing in a physical playground.

For this work, I studied Autcraft. Autcraft is a Minecraft community for children with autism and their allies run by parent volunteers. The goal of the Autcraft community is to have a safe space for children with autism to play Minecraft free from harassment and bullying (for more information visit the Autcraft website). As part of this study, I have been conducting an on-going ethnography within the community (see my paper for details). This study included analysis of activity within the Minecraft server, forums, website, Twitter, Facebook group, YouTube, and Twitch.

The Different “Spaces” of Autcraft

In this work, I found the Autcraft community actively creates access to social play using a variety of social media and other technology. By looking at the entire constellation of social media in the Autcraft ecosystem, we can understand how community members are engaging in a variety of social play experiences.

Access to the Autcraft community happens through three layers of interconnected environments: physical, liminal, and virtual. The physical space includes computer hardware and the environment in which players access the computer. This would be things like a bedroom, home office, or computer lab in the library. The liminal space includes the installation and configuration of the software, as well as user authentication. Finally, the virtual space includes the various social media.

When combined, these spaces allow play to happen because the children have access to play in a context in which they “fit.” When educators, therapists, parents, and researchers privilege face-to-face interactions, they are, in effect, creating disability in children who cannot or will not play in that way. In the Autcraft community, members can recreate the playground in an environment that is more comfortable for them. Community members leverage technology to create a playground where children are most able to play. And, having done this, autistic children engage in social play of which people thought them incapable.

The Autcraft community has used a constellation of platforms to enable social play for autistic children. Here the Autcraft community is using the constellation of technological platforms to help create the sense of place. These platforms cross into physical, liminal, and virtual spaces, working together to create access to play. Here the Autcraft community have leveraged virtual worlds to their advantage — in essence, transforming the disabled play experience into an enabled one.

How someone interacts with others is meaningful, regardless whether that interaction is online or offline. For the autistic children of Autcraft, playing in online spaces is preferable to physical-world, face-to-face interactions. The Autcraft community has defied the conventions set out by many educators, parents, researchers, and therapists by creating a space that privileges digital engagements over physical-world ones. In doing so, they have made a playground that is more comfortable for many autistic children.

Children need a place to play. There are two things to consider: creating a sense of place and allowing for both the real and unreal in these places. Therapists, educators, parents, and researchers tend to privilege the physical realm over all others for mediating sociality. Members of the Autcraft community turn this notion on its head, instead privileging virtual interactions over physical ones. But further still, I have shown how all these spaces — physical, liminal, and virtual — must work together to make play possible. The spaces the Autcraft community uses make the place that is Autcraft possible. These spaces, though some of them are digital, are no more or less “real” than the physical spaces making up a schoolyard or playground. Ultimately, it the sense of place in Autcraft that gives children access to social play.

A Minecraft sheep with hearts around its head.

For more details about my methods and findings, please see my paper that has been accepted to CHI 2019 (to appear in May 2019). I am pleased to announce that this has received Honorable Mention (top 20% of all papers) Full citation and link to the pdf:

Kathryn E. Ringland. 2019. A Place to Play: The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces. In CHI 2019. [PDF]

Acknowledgements

I thank the members of Autcraft for the warm welcome to their community. Thank you to Chris Wolf, LouAnne Boyd, and Oliver Haimson and other members of LUCI for their feedback on various iterations of this work. Special thanks to Severn Ringland for his diligent editing and Kyle Lee for insights while writing this up. Shout out to my dissertation committee who helped me shape my thoughts: Gillian Hayes, Tom Boellstorff, Mimi Ito, and Aaron Trammell. I would also like to thank Robert and Barbara Kleist for their support, as well as the ARCS Foundation. This work is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (T32MH115882). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. This work is covered by human subjects protocol #2014–1079 at the University of California, Irvine.

Players hanging out together in the Autcraft virtual world.
« Older posts
Playful Community Activism & Research

© 2024 Kate Ringland, PhD

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑