Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

advantage of developments in non-traditional approaches in security studies on the other. It seeks to
relocate the study of security in the everyday rather than in “security elites”, while also recognising the
everyday is always already imbricated in multi-scalar security projects. It argues that relocating the study of
security in the everyday allows us to centralise the impacts national and international security projects have
on everyday forms of (in)security, while also highlighting how security projects are marketed and advertised
to an imagined public (or indeed enemy), as well as interpreted and consumed in everyday contexts.
Holly Randell-Moon
Competing Futures: Community building and the Gigatown competition in the South Island
Gigatown was a joint initiative between the telecommunications company Chorus and the New Zealand
government to award a town “the fastest internet in the Southern Hemisphere” through a social media
competition. With South Island towns and urban centres facing Northern population drift and infrastructural
obstacles to global competitiveness, Gigatown promised security in economic and technological terms for
the winning town. Although framed as an energising and creative endeavour, the Gigatown initiative
mobilises competition as the policy mechanism through which resource allocation and a secure urban future
can be realised. The competition positions residents as both citizens, who have the right to participate in
policy planning and development, and consumers, whose social media proficiency is construed as good
citizenship for a development scheme assumed to yield benefits for all community members.
Joshua Pocius
The Living End: Security, Immunity, Biopolitics
A quarter-century on from Gregg Araki’s “irresponsible” queer reworking of the North American road genre
film in the age of AIDS, a spectre is haunting Europe: a spectre which similarly invokes the image of the
seropositive subject aimlessly wandering on a destructive path. As populist politicians call for a halt to
immigration in Europe and an exit from the European Union, as UKIP leader Nigel Farage recently advocated
in relation to HIV-positive migrants “swarming” the UK in search of publicly-funded antiretroviral therapy,
peculiarly neoliberal paradigms of securitisation, immunitarian biopolitics and containment are thrust into
focus. This paper seeks to address the outer limits of comparative analysis by redressing Araki’s 1992 film
The Living End in a post-AIDS climate of biometrics and biosecurity.
10W
Playful engagements and gaming cultures (Chair, Robbie Fordyce)
Ben Egliston Modulating videogame experience and perception through broadcast: Young people, videogames,
and broadcasting gameplay
Young people, particularly children born within the last decade, are an important demographic of
videogame-players. They represent a generation “born into” an environment where broadcasting play,
through fixtures like Twitch.tv and YouTube, are central characters in the experience of games. This paper
presents theoretical and empirical contributions arising from ongoing research into young people,
videogames, and broadcast (with focus on games Minecraft and DOTA 2). I am occupied with identifying and
exploring the impacts and outcomes of contemporary videogame culture”s networked ecology of screens,
with regards to modes of videogame experience. I venture questions surrounding experience and
perception, focusing on technical, bodily and material aspects of play, and how they are tempered by the
forces of broadcast. Young people “playing along” with popular broadcasters is a key point addressed
(configuratively, ingame, and also through physical gesture). Another point, refracted through an analysis of
the material, is the way in which screens are physically situated alongside others during play sessions;
augmenting the environment of play (for instance, early findings show children playing while watching
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