To celebrate International Women's Day today, Wednesday 8 March the Visualisation Insitute has compiled a showcase of projects involving women.
The theme for 2023 is Embrace Equity, to get the world talking about why equal opportunities aren't enough. People start from different places, so true inclusion and belonging require equitable action.
Various projects across the institute highlight important needs for women and gender equality.
Visualisation Institute's first showcase project is by Samantha Donnelly. Samantha is currently undertaking a doctoral thesis on Domestic Violence and Women’s Shelters. Her research questions the role of architectural design in the provision of safe, fit-for-purpose, long-term accommodation for women and children leaving domestic and family violence. It considers existing types of housing used by service providers in New South Wales, the needs of women and children living in refuge accommodation, and how the built environment supports the work of specialist staff from a feminist perspective with a focus on trauma-informed design.
Women and children who do leave violent homes are faced with the enormous task of resituating themselves in alternative accommodation, often temporary in nature, in order to work out the next phase of their lives. Research indicates their well-being is profoundly affected by access to safe, inclusive housing with services to assist in recovery from violence. Using a design-led approach, my research looks to the development of future refuge accommodation in an Australian context and advocates for access to safe, sustainable, long-term housing dedicated to women and children leaving in violence.
The second showcase project is currently ongoing, it aims to highlight the issues of sexism and racism that are still highly entrenched in various video gaming communities and is led by Dr. Jaime Garcia.
The video games industry is a multi-billion dollar area of interest for developers and players alike. Popular competitive multiplayer online shooting games, such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch and Valorant are well known to have a community that is highly sexist and racist. While developers have looked into this, their attempts at stopping this behavior have not had a significant impact to date. Current research indicates that high levels of sexism and racism are still highly entrenched in various video gaming communities. Furthermore, the developers of these games have also been in the spotlight for sexual harassment and discrimination within their respective organizations (Blizzard/ Riot). Ultimately, there is a lack of investigation within the research community that integrates game-developing processes into unified theories of discrimination (hegemonic masculinity and critical race theory) to reduce sexism and racism. Therefore, this research project aims to reconcile the video game development processes with principles that can reduce these harmful social issues to ultimately reduce the injustice that minority groups face within these video game communities.
Our final showcase project was completed by Thalia Johnson Dr William Raffe Dr Jaime Garcia.
This project aims to explore the research done on how video games give players the opportunity to explore gender, focusing on transgender and non-binary people’s experiences while giving baseline information on cisgender people. This project will explore the literature created within four categories: mental health, social, the avatar and the game world, and teaching and therapy tools. Mental health benefits help give the player critical thinking, as well as create an escape to relieve stress and help with depression and anxiety. Games further allow for more social interaction, giving transgender people support, while also allowing some to come out and socially transition within a safe environment. Researchers have found that video games help give players the ability to create their ideal selves, which transgender and non-binary people use to help figure out their gender identity and expression. Finally, video games can be used as tools both to help transgender people with mental health help and also to spread awareness about transgender people.
