Drama and Digital Arts Cultures

Drama and Digital Arts Cultures is a critical guide to the new forms of playful exploration, co-creativity, and improvised performance made possible by digital networked media. Drawing on examples from games, education, online media, technology-enabled performance and the creative industries, the book uses the elements of applied drama to frame our understanding of digital cultures.

Exploring the connected real-world and virtual spaces where young people are making and sharing digital content, it draws attention to the fundamental applied drama conventions that infuse and activate this networked culture. Challenging descriptions of drama and digital technology as binary opposites, the book maps common principles and practice grounded in role, embodiment, performance, play, and identity that are being amplified and enhanced by the affordances of online media.

Drama and Digital Arts Cultures draws together extensive original research including interviews with game designers, media producers, educators, artists and makers at the heart of these new digital cultures. Young people discuss their own creative practices and products, providing insight into a complex and evolving world being transformed by digital technologies. A practical guide to the field, it contains case studies and examples of the intersections of drama conventions and networked cultures drawn from the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Singapore and Australia.

Written for scholars, educators, students and ’makers’ everywhere, Drama and Digital Arts Cultures provides a clear understanding of how young people are blending creativity and learning with the powerful and empowering conventions of drama to create new forms of multimodal and transmedia storytelling.

David Cameron is deputy director of Academic Technologies in the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His publications include How Drama Activates Learning: Contemporary Research and Practice (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Drama education with digital technology (Bloomsbury, 2009) both co-edited with M. Anderson.

Michael Anderson is Professor of Education at the University of Sydney, Australia. His previous books include: Partnerships in Education Research: Creating Knowledge that Matters (Bloomsbury, 2014), and MasterClass in Drama Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning (Bloomsbury, 2012), and Drama education with digital technology, co-edited with J. Carroll and D. Cameron (Continum, 2009)

Rebecca Wotzko teaches in the School of Communication and Creative Industries, Charles Sturt University, Australia.