Staff Profile
Dr Matthew Spokes
Associate Professor and Dean
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I am an Associate Professor and Dean for the Social Sciences, with research interests in interactive entertainment, death and mortality, and spatial sociology. I lecture on death and mortality and spatial sociology.
I am co-director of the investigate.games research group.
My background is pretty diverse, starting with an undergraduate degree in Politics and Sociology from the University of East Anglia (2005) followed by a Master’s degree in Conflict, Governance and Development from the University of York (2007). I had a few years out to save for my PhD (working as a painter and decorator, then running an unsuccessful record label) before re-joining the University of York to start my PhD in Sociology in 2010. I worked as an Associate Lecturer at York from 2013 until 2016 when I joined York St John University.
- School – York Business School
- Email – m.spokes@yorksj.ac.uk
- Phone – 01904 876 279
- Research - View my work in RaY
Teaching
Alongside mentoring staff on research and supervising PhD students, I teach on the following modules:
- Sociology of Everyday Life
- Spatial Sociology
- Death
- Advanced Research Methods (Qualitative)
Research
My research activity is clustered around popular culture (specifically video games), social/spatial theory and death. My most recent book - Gaming and Virtual Sublime - came out in 2020 following a variety of publications on gaming and structural violence (with Jack Denham and Steven Hirschler); rural retreatism (with Jack Denham); the War on Terror and using gaming as a way of coping with death.
Following funding from the Screen Industries Growth Network I have completed a number of papers with colleagues in our research group
For the next three years, my research will underpin data collection at the Aesthetica Games Lab
Publications
Books
Spokes, M. (2020). Gaming and The Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear and Death in Contemporary Video Games. Bingley: Emerald (ISBN 9781838674328)
Spokes, M., Denham, J. and Lehmann, B. (2018). Death, Memorialization and Deviant Spaces. Bingley: Emerald (ISBN: 9871787565746)
Book chapters
Spokes, M. (2023) ‘Death. Carnage. Chaos: Mortality on the roof of the world’. In Coleclough, S., Michael-Fox, B and Visser R., Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan (ISBN: 9783031407314)
Denham, J. & Spokes, M. (2023). Il diritto alla città virtuale: la regressione rurale nei videogiochi open world. In Bittanti, M. (ed). Reset: Politica e videogiochi. Milano: Mimesis Edizioni
Journal Articles
Denham, J., Spokes, M., Coward-Gibbs, M and C Veal (2023). Programmed, Personal, Pedagogic Play: A Dialogic Model for Video Game Learning. In Pedagogy, Media and Culture
Spokes, M., Denham, J., Coward-Gibbs, M and C Veal (2023). ‘I wasn’t me grieving in my room. I was Spiderman’: Gaming, Loss and Self-Care following COVID-19. In Mortality
Veal, C., Coward-Gibbs, M., Denham, J. and M Spokes (2023) ‘You feel like you've found a place where you belong’: Symbolic Interactionism and Online Social Video Games in the Age of COVID-19. Submitted to Games and Culture
Denham, J and Spokes, M. (2022) Little Data: Navigating the New Normal with Incomplete and Idiosyncratic Datasets. In the International Journal of Social Research Methodology (online first)
Denham, J and Spokes, M. (2021) The Right to the Virtual City: Rural Retreatism in Open World Gaming. In new media and society, Vol 23 No. 6
Denham, J., Hirschler, S., and Spokes M., (2021) The Reification of Structural Violence in Videogames. In Crime, Media, Culture, Vol 17 No. 1
Spokes, M. and Denham, J. (2019) Developing Interactive Elicitation: Social Desirability and Capturing Play in The Qualitative Report Volume 24 Issue 4. (https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol24/iss4/10)
Spokes, M. (2019). The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, procedural rhetoric and the military-entertainment complex: two case studies from the War on Terror. In Vol 32 Issue 2 of Media, War and Conflict (https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635219828761)
Denham, J. and Spokes, M. (2018). Thinking Outside the Murderbox: Subjective Violence in Open World Gaming). In the British Journal of Criminology Volume 59 Issue 3. (https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azy067)
Spokes, M. (2018) “War…War Never Changes…”: Explicit and implicit death narratives in a post-apocalyptic gameworld. In Mortality, Volume 23, No. 2. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2017.1319348)
Professional Activities
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
