Community and Capital: Experiences of Women Game Streamers in Southeast Asia

This study explores how women game live streamers in Southeast Asia make sense of their experiences as performers and gamers on streaming platforms dominated by Western products and performers. We conducted 13 in-depth interviews guided by an interpretive phenomenological approach to understand their experiences. Women streamers strive to develop audience communities and gain acceptance in the larger gaming community, in part by successfully displaying their own gaming capital. However, they face challenges regarding audience connection and maintenance, presenting their own femininity amid stereotypes and misogyny, and the influence of their respective cultures on their success as performers. We discuss directions of study that further explore gaming and streaming as a form of cultural labor in Asia and the world.

Keep it “real”: the co-construction of authentic performance and audience connection in poetry slam competitions

With the poetry slam competition – a live, competitive spoken word poetry reading – as context for this project, the study explores the concepts of authenticity and audience connection as they relate to message production and meaning-making processes in the field of professional communication. This project uses a symbolic interactionist perspective and Goffman’s (1959) theory of dramaturgy to investigate the poet-audience relationship and discover how a display of authentic performance works to achieve the goal of audience connection. The researcher interviewed six slam poets from the Greater Toronto and Southwestern Ontario area about their experiences in the poetry slam world. Results from the interviews reveal that authenticity is co-constructed between poet and audience, involving a coalescence of private preparation strategies and onstage performance strategies that help craft a sense of credibility and honesty from the poet that, in turn, contribute to achieving successful audience connection by the slam poet as performer.

Keep it “real”: the co-construction of authentic performance and audience connection in poetry slam competitions

With the poetry slam competition – a live, competitive spoken word poetry reading – as context for this project, the study explores the concepts of authenticity and audience connection as they relate to message production and meaning-making processes in the field of professional communication. This project uses a symbolic interactionist perspective and Goffman’s (1959) theory of dramaturgy to investigate the poet-audience relationship and discover how a display of authentic performance works to achieve the goal of audience connection. The researcher interviewed six slam poets from the Greater Toronto and Southwestern Ontario area about their experiences in the poetry slam world. Results from the interviews reveal that authenticity is co-constructed between poet and audience, involving a coalescence of private preparation strategies and onstage performance strategies that help craft a sense of credibility and honesty from the poet that, in turn, contribute to achieving successful audience connection by the slam poet as performer.

Nicholas Daniel

Nicholas Daniel became known as an oboe soloist after winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year award at the age of eighteen. He has performed and conducted around the world and was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music. In this interview, he talks about the performer-audience connection, fidelity to composers, problem solving in music, creating an interpretation, and being a soloist. He also discusses the relationship of vocal and instrumental music, commissioning, and highlights of his career.