Daniel Jordan
Hello! My name is Dan, and I am a first-year PhD in Urban Studies. I’ve only been in Glasgow for just over two months, after moving from York, but I have loved my time here so far. Volunteering as a class representative has definitely helped me to settle in and meet as many of our amazing PGRs as possible. It has been so energising to be around such talented and committed people – and it has unquestionably helped me to think about my own research.
Due to being a lifelong nerd, my research focuses on trade union organising in the Scottish video game industry. Specifically, I want to examine why game workers are now seeing unionisation as a solution to their problems, what they want to achieve, and how they relate to company management. Compared to other creative industries, video games have never had a particularly strong collective spirit – thus examples of worker organising have traditionally been few and far between. However, this has started to change in recent years. Exploring this phenomenon in a country with such a vibrant game development scene (this is the home of Grand Theft Auto, after all) felt like a natural fit.
I am hoping to take a mixed methods approach to my research. First, I will undertake a quantitative survey of Scottish game workers. Data on the industry, and especially its workers, remains incredibly sparse; therefore, I hope collecting data on job roles and union membership can improve our knowledge of the workforce. Second, I will dig into the lived experience of game workers through qualitative methods: interviews and focus groups. This will give me the opportunity for in-depth conversations with the workers themselves. My aim will be to uncover the motivations behind recent trade union organising; the aspects of the work that are impossible to express in facts and figures. Hopefully, the combination of methods will coalesce into a holistic picture of Scotland’s video game industry.
While I am keen to start fieldwork, this is the area of my project that I am most nervous about. The thought of talking to real people is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. One thing I think most people will agree with is that PhD study often feels depressingly intangible. After all, it can be hard to hold on to your original motivation when you are bogged down in paperwork. Interviews, on the other hand, provide a chance for you to genuinely connect with those who you want to affect through your work. They provide a chance to cut through the abstraction and focus on the real-world problems that our research addresses. Nevertheless, being forced to leave the safety of my desk and venture out into the world remains a scary prospect.