HASTAC Scholar Spotlight: Hiranya Mukherjee

1) Why did you apply to HASTAC?

As I was nearing the end of my Master’s program in English Literature, I was apprehensive about leaving the university circle and setting forth into the world outside academia. In the five consecutive years that comprised my Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in Literary Studies, I had grown accustomed to always being part of an academic peer network and the elements that organically arose with it like informal symposiums, weekly special lectures, conferences, and so on. Graduating out of my university entailed me veering away to some extent from the immediate proximity of such activities and working independently towards my PhD applications. For such reasons, I was searching for academic communities that would allow me to participate in events, coordinate with fellow scholars, and also gain exposure on a global scale pertaining to Cultural Studies in general and Game Studies in particular. I got to know about the HASTAC Scholars Program from a fellow researcher in Digital Humanities, and as I looked into the program I thought it would be a perfect avenue for me to be a part of a scholar’s group that would complement that time period I would spend working on my PhD proposal outside the immediate university space.

2) What has been your favorite course so far as an instructor or student? Why

Here, I will break the rules a bit and mention two courses, both incidentally though from my undergraduate years. Prior to the commencement of my undergraduate studies, I had developed a deep interest in European Classical Literary texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s The Iliad. Since childhood I was always drawn towards mythology in general and Greek mythology in particular. To handle the stress of college applications after high school, I had found a sense of escapism in dabbling with such texts and stories. To my joy and surprise, one of the very first modules of study in my undergraduate program was on “Epic Narratives and The Iliad and The Odyssey”. The presence of this module made the transition into being a full-time undergraduate student in college right out of high school quite smooth because I had already been quite familiar with these texts and the debates surrounding them in academia. As a result, I found the classes to be very engaging, especially so because my instructor also used carefully curated examinations of ancient Greek words found in the original manuscripts of these texts and the depth of meanings they would possess. Not simply solely relying on the English translations, and approaching these texts in the module with a historiographical impetus pertaining to the historical contexts, and politics of translation and interpretation made the study quite an enjoyable endeavor for me and firmly created foundations for further effective undergraduate training for the succeeding semesters.
As for the second, well that one was a key module in shaping my interests as a Game Studies scholar and putting me on the path of research I am on currently. During the latter half of my undergraduate program, we had a module on the European Renaissance, specifically pertaining to a general study of the cultural trends that manifested during that period. In one of the lectures in that module, the professor walked in with a Sony PlayStation 3, hooked it to the projector and turned on a video game called Assassin’s Creed 2. The game was set in 15th century Italy, and as the protagonist, the player could explore peak Renaissance Florence and immerse themselves into a virtual historical tour of sorts. He made us play the game, walk the streets of the city and would explain the dominant cultural trends of the period with a special emphasis on the architectural practices as we neared important historical buildings in the game. That whole experience, along with further research into the field while being engaged with the module made me realize that I could actually study the narratives of video games in a serious manner in academia and the huge potential games have as uniquely 21st century mediums of storytelling.

3) What do you want to do after you graduate?

Now this is a dreaded question…especially pertinent to me because of me already having graduated from my Master’s program in May 2023. Immediately after graduation I started working on my PhD applications as I wanted to continue onward on my journey in academia. My primary interest is to work on a project that will analyze non-didactic video game narratives as an efficacious medium of climate change representation that bridges the gap between climate change awareness and comprehension. I also have interests in exploring literary connections between Japan and India post 1960s, pertaining specifically to visual narratives and comics. I am exploring viable options for me to explore these two research interests in the long run, and would eventually have to finalize my trajectory into my PhD by the end of this year.

4) What’s something that people would be surprised to know about you?

Presently, being a student of Literary and Cultural Studies my bread-and-butter has become the act of analyzing different kinds of texts. This being the case, people find it surprising when I reveal to them that till a certain age as a child I used to categorically detest reading books! I was always interested in listening to stories being read out to me or browsing picture books and encyclopedias for the visual narrative elements but never really had a certain proclivity to want to read fiction by myself. Two books changed my whole perspective and eventually instilled in me this desire to sift through textual fiction especially and non-fiction as well– that I am trying to make a career out of! At around the age of thirteen or fourteen I had stumbled across the collection: The Call of the Wild & White Fang by Jack London, and King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. For some reason, the plot and atmosphere of these two books gripped me and spoke to me like no piece of written fiction had to me before at that time, and I devoured them in two weeks. That whole experience of my journey into these books cemented my love for literature, that has ultimately led me to the path I walk on at present.

5) What are some things you wish you had known before you got into graduate school?

Firstly, to begin with, I did not have a proper idea as to how fast paced and hectic graduate school would turn out to be. When I look back on those two years, it seems to me that they were over in a blink of an eye, while simultaneously containing more than two years’ worth of experiences and growth. Secondly, I wish I had prepared better and effectively anticipated how difficult it would be to balance health and work as a graduate student. From my experience, as a student in their early twenties one can get a bit complacent regarding following good dietary and exercise habits especially in the midst of a hectic graduate school schedule. I have always had a habit of running, yet during those two years that took a backseat and when I resumed it after graduating, to my horror I realized how easily I started panting after running half the distance I would cover with ease before. That was the point when I took note of how I had overextended myself in grad school pulling off all-nighters, skipping breakfasts, powering through the day with caffeine, and on the weekends engaging in long hours of networking and socialization; not giving my body any chance to recover from the depredations of the week. This has been a significant learning experience for me that I will take with me onto all of my future endeavors, academic or otherwise!

6) How do you envision HASTAC and higher education in 10 years? Where do you fit in?

In my opinion, higher education worldwide is experiencing a rather unsavory trend that could get accelerated in the coming 10 years. The trend I mention here is one of increasing neoliberalisation of how educational institutions function, pertaining to human resource allocation and revenue generation. Increasingly, institutions are hiring more and more non tenure-track employees to teach courses rather than investing in permanent tenured academic instructors and researchers. The non tenure-track professors generally have significantly less aggregate compensation for the tasks they accomplish in the workplace compared to their tenured colleagues, even if they work longer hours and teach more courses. This particular system has grown out of the shifting view of higher education seen less of a public “good” and more of a “commodity” to invest in, thus also the higher general focus on STEM education over the Humanities. I feel amidst this trend, organizations like HASTAC can function as “shelters” of sorts for early-career scholars who are looking to secure good teaching and research positions. It could function as a space for networking and sharing of mutual experiences that could lead to the building of a community feeling and also function as an effective linkage between personal research and public outreach into wider academia.
Secondly, another pattern that is at work in academia nowadays is one of bridging links and breaking down boundaries. Being an early career researcher in Humanities, I have noticed more and more collaborative conferences, projects, and departments arising than ever before based on a strong interdisciplinary impetus. In a parallel way, we live in an age where there are more ways to disseminate one’s research within and outside the academic fold than just presenting at conferences, publishing papers, and writing books. There are digital contact points and mediums of dissemination nowadays such as YouTube, Discord, Coursera, and so on where one can reach out to a diverse audience and propagate one’s field of inquiry in a way that was not possible before. As I make progress in my academic career, I personally want to be able to integrate these resources in my work-flow so that I can reach out to entities outside the immediate purview of academia and stress on the “academic spirit” as being ubiquitous in society, if given a chance to express itself over the narrow view of what academia “should be”; being limited to certain kinds of activities, and a certain specific spatiotemporality within the walls of academic institutions. Here I add again, that HASTAC is functioning as one such agent of linkage between the inner world of academia and the larger outside world and can grow in that capacity even more in the coming years because of how it has embraced a flexible digital model of academic engagement that allows for multiple ways to engage in collaborative projects irrespective of timezones, and similar limitations.

7) How does digital scholarship fit into your research and teaching?

Taking into account my field of research, digital scholarship is of especial importance to my research and future teaching endeavors. My primary trajectory of inquiry pertains to the medium of video games being read as “electronic” or “digital” literature pertaining to how they function as mediums of narrative and participatory storytelling. These “ergodic” texts can also be made use of in pedagogy through gamification of learning methods, and in fact, has been experienced by me in my undergraduate years as I had mentioned before. Moreover, drawing from my answer to the previous question, I think that in this age of data and preponderance of digital platforms, it is crucial to be able to integrate digital tools and texts in one’s research– regardless of one’s immediate field of focus. This will ensure greater archival efforts of previous research and upcoming inquiries, as well as make collaboration a smoother process through an interplay of asynchronous and synchronous work-flows.

8) What do you hope to accomplish with your research and teaching?

One of my main aims, through my research and teaching, is to meaningfully add to the corpus that subscribes to video games being looked at as a capable medium of exploring narratives in equal footing with the other mediums considered as being more “serious” such as films and novels. Video games have long been seen through the lens of stigma and have been relegated as solely being sources of casual fun and “play”, even by academicians at times. Yet, this is far from the truth and in the last few years along with advances in technology– developers have been able to make video games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (by Ninja Theory) and The Last of Us (by Naughty Dog) that have explored mature narratives of trauma, mental illness, morality, and isolation. At the same time recent scholarship has underlined this trend and video games are being looked at for the part they can play in various realms to tackle real world problems such as representation, diversity, climate change, and so on. My research will specifically focus on climate change issues and how certain video games have the potential to simulate emergent experiences that facilitate the linkage between climate knowledge and climate experience, and thus climate comprehension. I hope that in the long run, this research contributes to the construction of a representational framework of climate change which can be used to inform the design principles of game developers and public policy makers alike to make positive changes in the approach to represent climate change as an issue of central importance in the 21st century– equal in importance to issues like terrorism and war, so that the dissonance between the veracity of the phenomenon and day-to-day awareness of it is altered at large.

9) What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to?

Well, first off, to stay on theme as the “Game Studies guy” I will mention a video game that I am currently doing a playthrough of: it is called Horizon: Forbidden West (by Guerilla Games). The events in the game are set in a post-apocalyptic world where Nature at large has reclaimed the Earth, and human civilization has regressed from the status-quo of the 21st century to something more of a tribal/ feudal society. One will find the world of the game populated by robotic creatures that resemble various animals ranging from Buffaloes, Tigers, Crocodiles, to even dinosaurs. These robot creatures each have their own place in the ecosystem and have appeared mysteriously on the surface of the Earth. The player takes control of Aloy, a member of the “Nora” tribe as she embarks on a personal quest to make sense of her origins and also to prevent an imminent calamity connected to the mysterious ecosystem of the robotic creatures and their relationship with the different tribes that populate the game world. The game explores various themes related to the post-anthropocene such as the “Gaia Hypothesis”, gender roles in societies, marginalization, and ecological equilibriums. Apart from this, I am also currently watching a series on Netflix called Ripley, which is a psychological thriller revolving around the escapades of a con-artist as he assumes different identities to engage in embezzlement and deception. I am loving the monochrome noir aesthetic that they have adapted and of course Andrew Scott is the protagonist so that’s always a win win!