Diamond Beverly-Porter, assistant professor in the Department of Digital Technology and Culture, has received an award from the Douglas L. Epperson Fund for Social Justice. Offered through WSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities, the award supports expanded research, exhibitions, and other major scholarly and creative work, and includes a financial award of $4,000 for the summer of 2026.
Professor Beverly-Porter will use this award to continue her research in culture, communication, and representation in digital games, specifically exploring fanfiction and fandom spaces as hyperlocal data commons where intimacy, care, and collective authorship operate outside dominant models of platform extraction and optimization. Rather than treating fandom as a large scale network, her work approaches it as a situated and relational infrastructure shaped by personal spaces, late night writing practices, affective labor, and shared cultural reference.
Beverly-Porter’s project will develop a forthcoming article for the journal of the British Fantasy Society, as well as a new interactive game. The article will examine the game Baldur’s Gate 3 and focus on the character Wyll, the only clearly Black companion, and his fan reception. Studying the intersection of race, fantasy, and fan labor, it will explore how some modding practices that whitewash the character actually function as counter speculative design, and how Black fans respond to race in fantasy in ways that extend beyond the game into broader cultural contexts.