Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

Digital Iran Reloaded: Iranian Censorship of Citizens and the Gaming Industry

During the summer of 2020, the Digital Iran project team investigated how videogames are curated by state and non-state agents to produce discourse, narratives, and counter-narratives about Iran. Digital Iran Reloaded deepens the scope of the original project by emphasizing the experiences of Iranian gamers. The project will specifically dive into circumvention tools used to navigate oppressive censorship and surveillance tactics by state agents in Iran and US economic sanctions. To do so, the project will elucidate reactive and proactive censorship measures by mapping previously used and current (anti)censorship, (anti)surveillance, and strategies to access the internet and online video games in Iran. The digital component of the project will be showcased as appendices for the dissertation "Affective Entanglements and Precarious Lifeworlds: Iranian Gamers in Culture'' on the project's site.