Meet Teddy Max Pozo of computer science, a multimedia writer and artist. Their art practice combines conductive materials with clay sculptures and original game designs to create unique game arcade machine and console installations.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Teddy Max Pozo is a multimedia writer and artist whose academic articles have been published in journals such as Game Studies, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Porn Studies, Mediascape, and Media Fields; anthologies including Digital Love and Rated M for Mature; the Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, and the Encyclopedia of Video Games. Their peer-reviewed academic article, “Queer Games After Empathy: Feminism and Haptic Game Design Aesthetics from Consent to Cuteness to the Radically Soft,” available online, has been included in multiple game studies and game design syllabi.
Pozo has a B.A. in film and media studies and French literature from Swarthmore College and a master’s and Ph.D. in film and media studies from UC Santa Barbara. They are currently working on a book, Touchy Feely Games, about the sense of touch, focusing on haptic technology and haptic aesthetics in queer and trans game design. Their art practice combines conductive materials with clay sculptures and original game designs to create unique game arcade machine and console installations. Pozo’s original course, designed while they were a Mellon Postdoctoral Media Arts and Culture Fellow at Occidental, invites students to create their own versions of such haptic media: physically and emotionally touching game design installations. Their games, documentation of work in progress, and games by their students, can be found at dr pozo.itch.io.
As a teacher in computer science, Pozo is also co-creating and expanding the new Comp 101 course, Justice and Equity in Technology, now required for all majors to take before their junior seminar. Inspired by the department’s mission to create a multidisciplinary computer science education that centers technology’s impact on society, and by the department’s group enrollment in the 2020 Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) Fellows program, Comp 101 challenges all computer science majors to engage in deep, challenging, and rewarding discussions about race, gender, disability, social stratification, class/caste, design, workplace culture, AI, algorithmic bias, global infrastructures and economies of computing, and imagination to challenge existing forms of extraction and exploitation. These experiences prepare students to contend with computing’s sometimes- exclusionary history and work toward dismantling systems of oppression created or encoded by computing, whether on a personal, community, national, or global level.