Power Dynamics at Play: A Spotlight on Andre Tarleton’s Boundary-Breaking Research
A Spotlight on Andre Tarleton’s Boundary-Breaking Research
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Andre Tarleton, a PhD candidate in Anthropology, was recently named as one of 50 awardees of this year’s competitive Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowships. Tarleton was selected from a pool of over 1,000 applicants after a multi-stage peer review process designed to review how a researcher’s work aligns or does not align with Mellon/ACLS’ desire to support students transcending the boundaries of doctoral research.
Our team recently spoke with Andre to learn more about their work, and how their research may expand the boundaries of known scholarship. At the center of their work is “Parc de Bête” — Cajun French for “Beast Park” — a tabletop role-playing game Tarleton designed as both a creative work and a research method.
The game explores what it means to build futures where disabled people are not treated as an afterthought. “I was working in a lot of spaces where folks were trying to do this kind of prefigurative politics,” Tarleton said, “and realizing that a lot of the visions of the future that people had didn’t really include disabled people.”
That realization eventually led Tarleton toward broader questions about exclusion and the ways far-right politics circulate in gaming spaces online and offline. Their research examines how tabletop role-playing communities become sites of both political recruitment and political resistance — especially within indie gaming communities where players actively reshape the stories they inherit.
“Players are able to talk back to designers through their own gameplay,” Tarleton said. “They’re co-creating their own theory at the table.”
Tarleton’s interest in games as a social and political tool also grew out of community work closer to home. While getting involved with the Holyoke Community Energy Project through UMass Amherst’s ELEVATE program, they helped design games that taught residents how energy demand response systems work. The experience revealed how games could make complicated systems feel immediate and participatory.
“There was something there,” Tarleton recalled. “Games are making people want to do things.”
That insight now informs a dissertation that blends ethnography, autoethnography and game design itself. Tarleton studies how marginalized players navigate gaming spaces while also reflecting on their own experiences as a multiply marginalized designer and researcher entering the indie tabletop world.
The Mellon/ACLS fellowship will give Tarleton something increasingly rare for graduate students: time.
“Being able to just have my full-time job be this research for the next year is just so amazing,” they said. The funding will allow Tarleton to compensate playtesters, hire artists to complete the game’s design and expand fieldwork beyond Northampton into working-class communities across the Pioneer Valley. They are particularly interested in how class shapes gaming cultures and political expression.
Tarleton credits much of their growth on the project to their mentors, including anthropology professor Nicholas Caverly, who helped them navigate graduate school as a first-generation student, and Krista Harper, who introduced them to networks of scholars working in the anthropology of games. They also highlighted the influence of Beaudelaine Pierre in helping shape the project’s theoretical framework.
“Being able to have someone say, ‘You don’t have to do everything,’” Tarleton said of their mentors, “has been really helpful.”
That balance — between scholarship and creativity, theory and lived experience, politics and play — is exactly what makes Tarleton’s work stand out. The fellowship recognizes not only a promising scholar, but a project reimagining what academic research can look like and who it can serve.