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


Follow the UniGR-CBS


⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠


⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠


⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠


⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠


⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠