“Rebooting Community after Gamergate” will be a public symposium celebrating diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Uniting scholars, journalists, game designers, educators, students, and gamers, this symposium will reimagine the cultural and social future of gaming by marking the ten-year anniversary of Gamergate. Lawrence Technological University (LTU) requests funding to support this four-day public symposium on September 19-24, 2024, in Southfield, MI. An interdisciplinary team of faculty in the Departments of Humanities, Social Sciences, Communications, and Design at LTU has been working for over a year to plan this symposium. Initial funding, in-kind and talent support from LTU and several institutional, community, and industry partners, the City of Southfield, and several of our Early Middle College high school programs is already in place. The Gamergate symposium will be a community-facing event that builds on LTU’s prior experience of hosting public events, including but not limited to the notable Humanity+Technology lecture series.

The symposium’s primary goal is to explore, analyze, and reflect on the social implications of the racist, misogynistic, fascist movement called “Gamergate.” As scholars and journalists have since pointed out, the harassment tactics that developed during Gamergate have since been deployed in other reactionary and misinformation social media/journalism campaigns.
Gamergate serves as a watershed moment in the history and development of digital media and culture that we do not have the luxury to forget. The Gamergate Symposium will include:

● a series of panels and roundtables on the topics of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in gaming, journalism and digital culture.
● a convention/demonstration “Gamer Village”–providing participants with opportunities to interact with various gaming-adjacent, industry, and educational organizations
● a game-a-thon–providing opportunities for participants, especially students, to explore future educational paths–such as digital humanities, journalism, cultural studies, philosophy, game studies, game design, and STEM.

Most notably, our three, nationally-recognized keynote speakers will give students the chance to learn from women journalists and academics working in games and culture; these talks will particularly support the Scripps Howard goal of demonstrating an inclusive journalism environment. Our first speaker, Dr. Rachel Kowert, is a psychologist and founder of Psychgeist®, is a multimedia content production studio for the science of games and pop culture. Dr. Kishonna Gray is a professor at the University of Kentucky and author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. Anita Sarkeesian is a multi-media journalist and author of Feminist Frequency and Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games; as a target of harassment during the original Gamergate campaign, her interactive conversation will be of particular relevance for prospective journalists.