Professor, Film + Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz / semurray[at]ucsc[dot]edu
Academy of Film, School of Creative Arts, October 14, 2026
A special thank you to Dr. Hong Zeng and my new friends at Hong Kong Baptist University, for the warm hospitality at their Research Seminar yesterday!
Thanks to Forest Scully-Blaker for snapping an pic of my new book at The MIT Press table at the Society for Social Studies of Sciences 50th Anniversary Conference. And, yes, it is looking at you.
I’m excited to participate in a panel on Fri Oct 29: “Don’t Hate the Player? Critiquing the Mechanics of power in the Game of Academia”. Thanks to Rainforest Scully-Blaker for the wonderful invitation, and to co-panelists Emma Vossen, Kishonna Gray, and Gerald Voorhees.
Abstract: As designed worlds taken up by independent actors, videogames are ideal sites for understanding how people navigate rule-based systems. As Mackenzie Wark has argued, capitalism operates much like a game that the player has “no choice to play” (2007). This roundtable assembles scholars of media studies, STS, digital humanities, and informatics, all of whom conduct critical, intersectional research on games and game culture. Our aim is to share our experiences and expertise across disciplines and institutions and to assemble a critical, sociotechnical framework that views academia as a game supported and facilitated by technopower (Murray 2026). From their origins in the military industrial complex (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009; Voorhees and Orlando 2018) to injecting labour into leisure time (Anable 2018; Scully-Blaker 2025), games “powerfully mirror, but also engender, a certain sense of how the world is” (Murray 2018, p. 2). We advance these conversations by turning the analysis onto scholarship itself. From publish-or-perish to the tenure track, academia is a grind that not everyone can endure (Berg and Seeber 2017; Vossen, 2017). For minoritized scholars, the deck is stacked inequitably (Gray and Chapple 2017; Bunjun 2021; Brewer 2026). Anyone speaking out against these injustices is met with indifference or hostility (Phillips 2020; Ahmed 2021), while those following dominant strategies frequently top the leaderboards. Understanding academia as a game offers new insights into how the university oppresses those who inhabit it while opening the possibility of imagining (Keeling 2019; Benjamin 2024) and enacting a more sustainable framework for higher education.
Joe Mulcaire published a great story on Technothriller in Bohemian! Read the article by clicking on the image. Story release is July 28, 2026.
US $35.00 /$48.00 CAN paperback
9780262051019
Available for pre-order through the booksellers:
I’ve been looking forward to seeing this in print, a new Teaching Media JCMS Teaching Dossier. Have a look! Many thanks to all involved, especially Ryan Banfi and Alenda Chang!
KIRKUS has published a new review of my soon-to-be-released book, Technothriller. Check it out here:
“Scholarly, in-depth survey with insightful critiques of a fairly recent film genre.”
I’m grateful to be included in an anthology!
Reading Media: How to do Textual Analysis reinvigorates one of media and cultural studies’ most foundational methods at a moment when it is most needed, showing its continuing vitality by adapting it to new media environments, cultural objects, and scholarly questions.
The volume insists that the close study of meaning, form, and representation remains central to understanding media’s power. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars, the book offers a diverse toolkit: from narratological and semiotic analysis of film and TV, to historical poetic accounts of TikTok, multimodal analysis of Afrobeats music videos, and postcolonial criticism of games. Essays extend the scope of textual analysis to unexpected objects—such as plastic waste, memes, and refugee-authored media—while others demonstrate how texts operate across platforms, genres, and transmedia franchises. Beyond offering new and improved approaches to textual analysis, each chapter illustrates its approach using a specific case study, functioning both as a step-by-step how-to guide and as an example of textual analysis in action.
Reading Media advances a vision of textual analysis that is rigorous yet flexible, attuned to both aesthetics and politics, and responsive to today’s media environment. Essential for students and scholars in media, communication, and cultural studies, Reading Media both reaffirms and renews textual analysis as an indispensable way of engaging with the mediated worlds that shape contemporary life.
Warm thanks to Paul McGuinness and friends at University of Sussex for inviting me to speak on Demon Seed…
In Technothriller (The MIT Press, 2026), Soraya Murray reveals how popular American films featuring advanced technology—mainly biotech, military, and computational—capture our cultural anxieties, dreams, and convictions about the power and meaning of our innovations.
Along with iconic adaptations from technothriller novels by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, such as The Hunt for Red October and The Andromeda Strain, Murray considers Westworld, Rollerball, Demon Seed, WarGames, Ex Machina, Tenet, M3GAN, and The Creator, as well as the Terminator and Mission: Impossible franchises. Through these films and others, she traces deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology and innovation—and proposes new interpretations of the troubled, sometimes catastrophic relationships between humans and their inventions.
In this talk, Murray shares her work on Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977), a technothriller based on the 1973 book by Dean R. Koontz, in which a supercomputer intelligence ensnares its innovator’s wife in her smart home and forces her to carry its offspring.
The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, examining the impact of Orwell‘s visionary novel, is now available in Japanese!
Included is my essay on the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on video games.
