Rachel Carson College Faculty Fellows
Sikina Jinnah is Rachel Carson College's new faculty chair!
The Chair of the Faculty is an Academic Senate member, other than the Provost, who is elected by the college Faculty to serve a two year term, and will serve as a member of the Executive Committee.
Dr. Jinnah is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department, an affiliated faculty member in the Environmental Studies Department, and a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research focuses on the shifting locations of power and influence in global environmental governance, and in particular the role of transnational actors in environmental decision-making. Her most recent projects examine how key norms in global climate politics shape power relations, the role of U.S. preferential trade agreements in shaping environmental policy in trading partner nations, and the politics of climate engineering governance.
- Pronouns she/her
- Title
- Associate Professor
- Provost, Porter College
- Division Arts Division
- Department
- Film and Digital Media Department
- Affiliations Porter College
- Phone 831-459-4947
- Fax 831-459-1341
- Website
- Office Location
- Communications Building, 109
- Office Hours email for appointment / email is the best way to reach me
- Mail Stop Film and Digital Media
- Mailing Address
- 1156 High Street
- Santa Cruz CA 95064
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Visual Culture; Cultural Studies; Visual Arts; Video Games, Game Design, Game Studies; Game Studies; Contemporary Art; Contemporary Cinema; Digital Media; Diversity; Critical Theory
- Courses FILM 80V Video Games and Visual Culture; FILM 80T Technothrillers; FILM 234 Toward an Ethics of New Media; FILM 194C New Media Seminar: Games, Representation, and the Cinematic
- Advisees, Grad Students, Researchers Ksenia Firsova, Allen Riley, Saramanda Nell Swigart
Summary of Expertise
Visual culture including digital media, film, video, and electronic games. Theories of technology and globalization. Media representations of technological and scientific advancement.
Research Interests
Visual culture including contemporary art, film and video games. Digital media art, theory, and criticism. Cultural Studies. Theories of technology and globalization. Intersectional approaches to politics of identity and representation.
Biography, Education and Training
Soraya Murray (PhD Cornell) studies contemporary visual culture, especially film and video games. She is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writings may be found in journals in the areas of contemporary art, film and digital culture, including venues such as Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Public Art Review, Third Text, Open Library of Humanities, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Feminist Media Histories, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the European Journal of American Studies, Film Quarterly and Critical Inquiry.
Her essays are anthologized nationally and internationally, including most recently, EcoGames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis (Holland 2024), Reset (Italy 2023), Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth and Violence in the Video Game West (USA 2023) and Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies (Germany 2022). Murray joined the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies editorial board in 2023, and is a member of the critical/historical game studies journal ROMchip’s editorial group.
Murray’s book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback Bloomsbury 2021), considers video games from a visual culture perspective and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes and even complex struggles for recognition. Murray is currently co-editing an anthology with media and games scholar TreaAndrea Russworm on antiracist futures in games and play. She is also publishing a new book on anxiety films about technology from the 1970s to the present called Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination.
Murray is currently the Provost of Porter College.
Ph.D., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
M.A., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
M.F.A., University of California, Irvine, CA
B.F.A., Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA
Selected Publications
On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, hard 2018 / paper 2021)
Teaching Interests
Visual Studies, Digital Media and Culture; Cultural Studies; Media History and Theory; Contemporary Art; Film Studies; Issues of Cultural Globalization; Constructions of Identity; Video Games; Cultural Representations of Technology
