“Are You on Roblox Yet?” Tracing Digital Play Among Brazilian Transnational Children and Their Families in the United States (Poster 14)

• In Event: Thursday Poster Session 4:20 pm
  In Poster Session: Languages, Literacies, and Representations Poster Session

Abstract

​​This presentation is part of a one-year connective ethnography that examines how the relational and sociopolitical dimensions of family life are imbued and transformed across homes and digital playspaces. Specifically, we investigate how three Brazilian immigrant children and their parents collaboratively engaged on Roblox – a free, online “sandbox” gaming platform in which players use digital tools to create customized worlds. Drawing on game studies’ concept of bleed and the literature on transnational childhood and family digital cultures, our findings show how participants accomplished sustained relational work across analogue and virtual playspaces by forging avenues for affinity, transpatial sensemaking, and relational bleed. Children and families did so in spite of the ideological and ludic (i.e., game-based) constraints encountered on Roblox.

Authors

• Mariana Lima Becker, University of Georgia

• Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University