Student profiles
Meg Ritchie
Email: m.ritchie@lancaster.ac.uk
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Dr Eva Li
Dr Laura Clancy
Dr Rob Gallagher (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Research Summary
My research critically interrogates the representation of explicit asexualities through the post-apocalyptic video game franchise, Death Stranding (Kojima Productions, 2019; 2022). It offers a twofold, autoethnographic understanding into how games – and the analyst – construct asexualities, going beyond discourse so as to capture the phenomenological and experiential processes that go into understandings of sex, sexuality, desirable and desiring bodies. To do this, I have both developed and utilised an autoethnographic “player-as-analyst” methodological approach, detailing a unifying methodology that addresses and foregrounds the embodied experience of the researcher, spanning both the object of study, the process of data collection, and the self. As such, my research offers a constitutive and generative approach to analysing video games and asexualities, transforming the oft dismissed “bad object” of representation into a site of erotic power.
Research Interests
Autoethnography,
asexuality studies,
game studies,
nostalgia and phenomenology.
Publications
Ritchie, M. (2023) ‘Playing with Research: Transforming Representational Studies and Method through Autoethnographic Inquiry’, Futuring Outside the Box: New Dynamics in Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, 15 June.