Current work by Elizabeth Losh



The Virtualpolitik book will be coming out from MIT Press in Spring 2009. The blog by the same name won the John Lovas Award for Best Academic Weblog in 2007 and was positively reviewed by Inside Higher Ed in December 2007.

Much of my published research has to do with how government-funded videogames and simulations, designed for military personnel or emergency first responders, serve as rhetorical objects that are "things public," in the sense of the traditional res publica. I have written extensively about two programs in depth that have also garnered considerable attention in the mainstream media: Tactical Iraqi, an interactive Arabic language-learning program based on the popular 3-D game Unreal Tournament, and the virtual reality simulation Virtual Iraq, which is designed to use game technology to desensitive soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder through exposure therapy via a head-mounted display.

At the Philosophy of Computer Games conference in Italy, I spoke about "Instrumentalism and the Ethics of Videogame Play: The Tactical Iraqi Controversy," a subject that I will also be discussing at Living Game Worlds this year. Two months earlier, I gave one of the "Experience Spatiality" talks in the special session of the Joint International Conference on Cyber-Games and Interactive Entertainment in Perth, Australia, "The Palace of Memory: Virtual Tourism and Tours of Duty in Tactical Iraqi and Virtual Iraq." I was also a presenter at the Serious Games Summit in Washington D.C. I presented a paper at the Sandbox Symposium held in conjunction with the International SIGGRAPH Conference in Boston, "Making Things Public: Democracy and Government-Funded Videogames and Virtual Reality Simulations." I also participated in a SIGGRAPH panel about ethics and videogames, which received some interesting media coverage from Game Politics and Gamasutra. A few months earlier I presented an article about Tactical Iraqi, "In Country with Tactical Iraqi: Trust, Identity, and Language Learning in a Military Video Game," for the Digital Arts and Culture Conference. It was subsequently published in Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice.

Although this work on videogames is also important in the new opening of my forthcoming book project, Virtualpolitik: Digital Rhetoric and the Subversive Potential of Information Culture, I use the attention paid to videogames as a way to provide context for many other new digital genres that are critical to the workings of government and also subject to its regulations: web pages, e-mail, digital archives, and PowerPoint presentations.  

Many of the ideas in the book are already in traditional print.  For example, check out my work on digital libraries in Literary and Linguistic Computing from Oxford University Press (now listed on the journal's "most read" list) or my hypertext essay on government websites about 9-11 that was featured in the online journal Kairos (now listed as a model for potential contributors) or my paper about how the new "two cultures" in academia conflict, which has been published by the Center for the Study of Higher Education.

I am very pleased that my collaborative interdisciplinary work as a writing program administrator will be showcased in the lead article of the forthcoming MLA volume on First Year English in January of 2007.  This article was written with Professor Michael Clark.  I have also been collaborating with Professor Susan Jarratt on a project about biliterate writers and the transnational identities of multilingual students, which appeared in the Journal of Second Language Writing in June of 2006.  On my sites you will also see the many websites that were developed with my longtime colleague and collaborator Ellen Strenski. I have also guest lectured in the Department of Informatics in conjunction with another collaborator, Jennifer Cool, about the rhetoric of Information Science as an emerging discipline during the post-War period.

Community activism is also an important part of my work as a rhetorician. For example, I encourage a different philosophy about cyber-safety from the fear-based messages in the mainstream media. My "Ten Principles for the Digital Family" has been reprinted by several parents' groups. I also speak to groups like the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project about the difference between the rhetorical strategies of grassroots campaigns and social marketing.

Many thanks to those who came to the Blogs, Wikis, and Listservs panel last year and heard my presentation on blogs.   Since the panel, I've enjoyed hearing from readers of my virtualpolitik blog, which covers current events about digital rhetoric, and from Siva Vaidhyanathan's Sivacracy, where I am a regular contributor. I will also be giving a talk about podcasting, which I will also be discussing at the Popular Culture Association annual convention in Boston.

In my spare time, I maintain my website on political theater on the Internet and welcome submissions that are disseminated widely through e-mail.

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