Aleena Chia

Aleena Chia is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Her research focuses on the infrastructures of gaming industries, examining how digital labor, platform capitalism, and datafication shape perceptions of work, leisure, and precarity in creative sectors. She explores tensions between productivity and playfulness, addiction and engagement, and the socio-economic impacts of virtual and networked societies.

• Background: Postdoctoral research at the Academy of Finland’s Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies; internship at Microsoft Research New England.
• Research Themes: Digital labor politics, structures of feeling in digital modernity, gamification, and the future of work in creative industries.

Chia’s ethnographic work engages game hobbyists and industry aspirants to challenge narratives about work’s future and advocate for economically/emotionally sustainable livelihoods. She advocates for interdisciplinary dialogue, bridging humanities with computational and social sciences.

Her book recommendation, The Mushroom at the End of the World, highlights her interest in ethnographic analysis linking local/global scales and capitalist systems.