Associate professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India, and a pioneering games studies researcher from the Indian Subcontinent.
His research looks at a diversity of topics such as videogames and storytelling, videogames as colonial and postcolonial media, gaming cultures in the Indian Subcontinent and currently, Indian boardgames and their colonial avatars. Author of three monographs: Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK, 2017) and Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations (Bloomsbury India, 2022). He is currently working on a book project on Indian board games and colonialism.
He was named a 'DiGRA Distinguished Scholar' in 2019 by the Digital Games Research Association and a Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) fellow in 2022. He is also an affiliated senior research fellow at the Centre of Excellence, Game Studies at the University of Tampere.
During the 8th ŚFN Souvik Mukherjee, PhD, will deliver two talks at the Gaming Zone:
● Can the Subaltern Play? Videogames and Perspectives of Play from the Margins
This lecture will introduce the two-decade-old field of Game Studies from the perspective of the colonized, the Othered and the Global South. By default, video games perpetuate a deep-seated and often not obvious colonial logic in their gameplay that emerges on analysing their narratives and algorithms. This talk will challenge the agency-based thinking around video games and present the scenario from the perspective not of the entitled agent but that of the dispossessed and the oppressed; in doing so, it shall address issues of what it means to play outside of positions of privilege and Empire.
● Videogames and Science Fiction: Postcolonial Perspectives
Both as a standalone discussion and a continuation of the previous talk, this session looks at how video games do Science Fiction and how again colonialist positions are privileged in the SF narratives of video games.
What happens though when we do SF differently and more inclusively? This talk is going to address Chattopadhyay's concept of the mythologerm and Subaltern SF in relation to video games