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ON AIR – Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Border Studies
In this episode, Tobias Schank (Saarland University) speaks with Joon-Ho/Ryan Ahn Roden, a PhD candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa and former visiting scholar at Saarland University in January 2026. Joon-Ho specializes in Indigenous politics, alternative futures, Critical Ocean Studies, and Border Studies, and brings all four into a tabletop role-playing game of his own design.
Together, Tobias and Joon-Ho reflect on the immersive game sessions conducted with students at Saarland University, in which participants played a collective entity navigating the collapse of human civilization, a crumbling border wall, and the question of what it means to exist in a world defined by foreignness.
They discuss play as a method of knowing, storytelling as resistance, and the next step: presenting their results at the Annual Conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies in the roundtable session “Playing the Frontier: Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Border Studies”.
More info: Joon-Ho/Ryan Ahn Roden
More info: Tobias Schank
Subscribe to the UniGR-CBS monthly newsletter here: http://newsletter.borderstudies.org
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By UniGR-Center for Border StudiesIn this episode, Tobias Schank (Saarland University) speaks with Joon-Ho/Ryan Ahn Roden, a PhD candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa and former visiting scholar at Saarland University in January 2026. Joon-Ho specializes in Indigenous politics, alternative futures, Critical Ocean Studies, and Border Studies, and brings all four into a tabletop role-playing game of his own design.
Together, Tobias and Joon-Ho reflect on the immersive game sessions conducted with students at Saarland University, in which participants played a collective entity navigating the collapse of human civilization, a crumbling border wall, and the question of what it means to exist in a world defined by foreignness.
They discuss play as a method of knowing, storytelling as resistance, and the next step: presenting their results at the Annual Conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies in the roundtable session “Playing the Frontier: Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Border Studies”.
More info: Joon-Ho/Ryan Ahn Roden
More info: Tobias Schank
Subscribe to the UniGR-CBS monthly newsletter here: http://newsletter.borderstudies.org
Follow the UniGR-CBS
LinkedIn
Facebook
Bluesky
Instagram
Youtube