Scholar Spotlight: Soraya Murray
- Scholar Spotlight:Soraya Murray
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Soraya Murray (Derek Conrad Murray, 2020).
Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on contemporary visual culture with particular interest in art, film, and video games. An associate professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Murray's first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018), examines how post-9/ 11 era mainstream games mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes, and even complex struggles for recognition. In recent years, her writings have focused on both methodological and ethical considerations of critical game studies as well as modeling intersectional approaches that consider race, gender, class, nation, and sociopolitical context.
In relation to your work as a whole, how do you perceive the audience(s) for your work?
I write for visual studies and cultural studies scholars and students, for those interested in mass media, and really for anyone who looks at video games—or, more generally, visual cultures of technology—and wants a humanistic [End Page 1] framework for understanding them. My work is a delivery device for theoretical consideration of the advanced technological culture in which we live today, refracted through approachable visual forms like films and video games. There is a persisting failure of the imagination regarding the futures we envision for ourselves and who belongs in them. I would describe what I'm doing as a project of inclusive reframing, of revisionist intervention, or an opening up of possibilities.
Can you say a little about your interests as a scholar and teacher and what brought you to study art and games?
My interest in visual culture came from visiting museums all over the world, something my parents insisted on when we traveled. I was first socialized into advanced technology through my access to home console video games and later through grade school programs in Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) programming. Also, my parents met on a blind date at a party celebrating Neil Armstrong's first moon walk in 1969. Somehow my fate feels tied up in that utopian promise of the space race.
In terms of pursuing academia, I always respected and venerated the educators in my life. As a kid, I used to beg to go to the bookstore, like other kids beg for the toy store. I was captivated by screens. I loved films that were extremely heady and, in retrospect, conventionally inappropriate for my age. The signs were there from the start, but it was a long and twisty path to find my way to academia as a profession. Some people seem to know from very early on exactly what they should be doing in life; I had to see past other people's expectations, to follow my instincts and proclivities.
Please reflect on what it means to you to play, study, and teach video games in a technical and cultural climate that has so often promoted racism, sexism, homophobia, and other discriminatory practices. Have these realities influenced your work or experiences with video games?
The encoding of technology as the domain of white male genius has been manufactured in the US context over a long period of time and with concerted effort. These perceptions around who can be the authentic innovator and who is relegated to the consumer have been shored up in education, mass culture, and the workplace. The promotion of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other discriminatory practices is a sign of weakness in the industry, not strength. Being in Silicon Valley, I see that the constant flow of people who make these innovations possible is extremely diverse—it is literally like living in an international airport terminal. But this is quite discontinuous with the ideology and the public-facing image of innovation. Having a historical understanding of how these ideologies have come into being helps me to keep perspective that the friction that I may experience in the classroom or in professional circumstances is a by-product of long social programming...
