Jim Malazita (Ph.D. Drexel University) is Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies and the Associate Director of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He studies the co-production of technological and social elements of games and creative software, with a particular focus on game engines, gender, and race. His current work examines the role of game companies and game engines in shaping the infrastructural and legal standards of the future web. 

His forthcoming book, Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine is to be released by the MIT Press in July 2024. This first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Taking a novel critical platform studies approach, he also raises deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what “counts” as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself. 

Malazita’s writing has been featured in a wide variety of academic venues, including in Digital Creativity, Design Issues, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Feminism in Play. His research and teaching have been supported by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the NEH Division of Educational Programs, the Popular Culture Association, The New Jersey Historical Commission, Red Hat Inc., and Rensselaer’s Teaching and Learning Collaboratory.