Alicia Crawford, who won Sony Online Entertainment and Scholarship America’s Gamers In Real Life (G.I.R.L.) Scholarship

Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of co-authoring a series of columns for Flow with Jennifer deWinter of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Our columns, which focus on sexism in the gaming industry, have now all been published, which means you can go read them all, in order, at your leisure.

• “Rescuing Anita: Games, Gamers, and the Battle of the Sexes” from Flow 17.3, which ran in December 2012
• “#1reasonwhy Women in the Gaming Industry Matters” from Flow 17.7, which ran in February 2013
• “We Resign from Sexism in Games Effective Immediately” from Flow 17.10, which went up earlier this month

I worked on Flow for several years as a graduate student, first as a student editor and later as a senior editor, and I also helped organize the first two Flow conferences and spoke at the third. It’s been a pleasure to be able to work with the publication now from the other side as an author.

Flow is a great forum for what I’ve heard referred to as “fast scholarship” — scholarly work that engages with contemporary culture in a way that is timely and topical and less hindered by traditional academic publishing models. In the case of Flow, that model has been highly productive and has generated some deeply compelling work that might not quite fit the typical journal article format.