Autumn 2021
The Autumn 2021 Digital Impact Award recipient was Kellynn Wee!
Kellynn is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. Kellynn’s research focuses on table-top roleplaying games — mainly Dungeons and Dragons — in Singapore. She focuses on D&D as an example of a collaborative storytelling practice, and how it allows humans navigate the contingency of human existence through the co-construction of narrative and fate.
Kellynn’s project will develop a roleplaying game set in Singapore that invites players to speculate about climate futures through the ethos of applied hope. Applied hope games draw from a burgeoning creative movement that seeks to imagine utopic futures through genres such as solarpunk and hopepunk in opposition to dystopic worlds founded on apocalypse and despair. These games can conjure a space of playfulness, openness, and potentiality in our relationship to the future; by doing so, they create imaginative latitude for action and change in the present.
Spring 2021
The Spring 2021 Digital Impact Award recipient was Dr. Charlie Rumsby!
Charlie used the award to create a short film about Christian mission in Cambodia.
Cambodia, a predominantly Buddhist society, is currently the 9th fastest growing Christian country per capita in the world.[1] The growth of Christianity is what inspired me to understand the motivations of the Christian missionaries from Southeast Asia and the impact of their mission work.
Drive to School is a short film that documents the motivations of young Christian missionaries Charles and Ai who are striving to bring education and hope to Cambodia’s stateless children. Moved by witnessing the vulnerability to prostitution these children face to make ends meet, they attempt to offer alternative routes to learning and employment. Not without challenges along the way.
[1] Philip Coggan, ‘The Rapid Growth of Christianity in Cambodia’ [2016] Herald Malaysia Online.
Charlie is a Lecturer in Childhood and Youth at Sussex University, and a visiting research fellow at the Anthropology Department at the LSE.
ASEAS 