October 30, 2020
Student profile: Melinda Cohoon – Exploring the Political Worlds of Online Videogaming, between Iranian Gamers and the 2020 US Election
Melinda Cohoon, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Washington’s NMES program, is setting out on a year of dissertation field research, funded by an SSRC Social Data Research and Dissertation fellowship. Her methods have much in common with traditional ethnography, drawing heavily on interviews and participant observation, but her field site is atypical. She does her research in the virtual realm of online gaming and social platforms like Reddit, Twitch.TV, Steam, Twitter and World of Warcraft (WOW).
Her dissertation project is “Affective Entanglement: A Virtual Ethnography of Iranian and Iranian-American Gamers in World of Warcraft and Social Media.” It highlights how online videogaming platforms are increasingly critical arenas for the development of transregional political discourse, which are rarely accounted for in discussions of social media’s impacts. Mindy’s broader research is particularly focused on political discourses among Iranian and Iranian American users, and on female gamers’ experiences of navigating this politicized online world.
Right now, however, in conjunction with the Social Science Research Council’s 2020 Social Data Initiative, she is exploring dialogue in these online spaces specifically in relation to the upcoming US election. Inspired by the highly politicized debates she encountered on WOW after Trump’s election in 2016, including a strong and rising current of alt-right sentiments, she points out how the American election foments online discourses of misogyny, white power and Islamophobia even further. Among the online communities she studies, the elections are discussed very specifically in terms of sanctions and other elements relating to Iran, but also subject to heavy alt-right trolling, microaggression and abuse. Much of this discussion, including the pronounced far-right and antagonistic elements, operates thorough particular codes of memes, which often develop a high specificity to particular virtual platforms or communities.
As she says, “spaces online are already political; whether it’s just fantasy towards normativity or denying what’s in their ordinary lives and trying to find some kind of normalcy, it’s already a kind of political space, it’s already a political ecosystem, especially for women. The gaming space is traditionally white and male and it traditionally likes to denigrate. It likes to troll… and women experience that in multiple contexts, especially Iranian women, who already get so much general harassment, questions of ‘why aren’t you getting married’ and then creepy things – you’re sexy, here’s where you live, I know your address.” She adds that for Iranian gamers in particular, who have to navigate and circumvent so many restrictions just to play the games in the first place, accessing these online forums is already a political act, with possession of the technical knowledge and physical hardware to do so further stratifying and privileging entry.
spaces online are already political whether it’s just fantasy towards normativity or denying what’s in their ordinary lives and trying to find some kind of normalcy, it’s already a kind of political space, it’s already a political ecosystem, especially for women
The project’s conclusions will be of deep relevance to a wide array of scholars and audiences interested in social media, US, Iranian and Middle Eastern politics, transregionality and the social politics of online communication. Indeed, as the COVID-afflicted current world sees ever more of our social and working lives migrate to online platforms, we should all be paying very close attention. Debates and discourses circulating on video-gaming and other online platforms are also complicated by the inherent transregionality of digital space and the different kinds of parameters and boundaries they are subject to, the study of which is a key element of her project. It also poses very particular challenges for establishing coherent project design, a methodology that can encompass such different platforms and the mechanics of online space, and obtaining research consent. Gaining trust and building rapport with interviewees and interlocutors through more impersonal digital formats, for example, can be particularly challenging.
Good luck Mindy!
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About the AuthorWill Bamber
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