The Bobby Yan Lectureship in Media and Social Change featuring Zaire Lanier

Zaire Lanier

is the writer of South of Midnight (2025), a landmark video game that uses interactive storytelling to explore the haunted landscapes of the American South and the enduring legacies of chattel slavery. Lanier will deliver this year’s Bobby Yan Lecture for Media and Social Change in conversation with Professor Jon Chambers (Digital Media Practices) and Jerome Dent (Communication and Africana Studies). Together, they will discuss the cultural and political possibilities of video games as a medium for social critique, historical memory, and narrative intervention. Drawing on Lanier’s experiences as a Black woman working within a predominantly white, male‑dominated game industry, the conversation will examine questions of representation, authorship, and power in contemporary media, while imagining more inclusive futures for digital storytelling and game development.