PJAIT students PJAIT the nationwide debate “Poland: What’s Next?”
We cordially invite you to an open lecture for PJAIT members PJAIT the general public by Dr. Małgorzata Citko-Du Plantis (University of Tennessee, USA) "Game on 'Japan': How Video Games and AI are Reimagining Cultures," which will take place on December 18, 2025, in Auditorium A1 from 12:15 p.m. to 1:45 p. m. The event is curated by Dr. Jakub Karpoluk (PJAIT).
Video games have become one of the most dynamic and influential forms of cultural production, offering interactive experiences to diverse communities around the world. They often present cultures in new and unexpected ways to entertain. Game designers and writers in the West, who rarely have training in cultural studies, history, and languages, typically draw on the collective imagination of different cultures rather than research-based knowledge. Relying on stereotypes and clichés that can distort and reinterpret facts, they alter perceptions of the cultures they draw from. This is especially true of how aspects of pre-modern Japanese culture are represented in popular video games produced outside Japan. Processed through creative translation that is not always able to balance entertainment with cultural authenticity, ethical representation, and responsibility to intellectual history, the "Japan" imagined in foreign video games is often exoticized, historically remixed, and commercialized. However, this promotes Japanese studies at a time of crisis in the humanities at all levels of education. The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, increasingly used in video game production, further complicates this situation, enabling new forms of interpretation and creativity while increasing the risk of distortion and reduced engagement with original cultural sources.
Dr. Małgorzata Citko-Du Plantis
Dr. Jakub Karpoluk
A PhD from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, he is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Tennessee. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Embracing Instability: Imagining "Man'yoshū" in Medieval and Modern Japan, in which he challenges the exclusive legitimacy of a single manuscript of Man'yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, 759–785)—the first surviving collection of Japanese court poetry (waka)—as the standard for research, teaching, and translation.
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She also argues that Man'yōshū is not only a text, but also an image, a stabilized structure, a genre, an etiquette, or a matrix of knowledge about "Japanese-ness" in Japan and beyond. Her research interests include the instability of knowledge and the mechanisms of stabilizing the transmission of knowledge in pre-modern cultures, representations of pre-modern Japan in contemporary popular media, representations of women in Japanese culture, the intellectual history of Japan, and non-Western digital humanities. She is the recipient of numerous research grants and awards, including from the Japan Foundation, Fulbright, and Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). She has presented at national and international conferences, including the Association for Asian Studies, the Modern Language Association, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and the Medieval Academy of America; she has also been a guest speaker at research institutions, including Yale University and Dartmouth College.
He is a researcher specializing in performing arts and visual culture, an expert on Japan, a theater artist, and a curator. He is a professor at the Department of Japanese Culture and New Media Art at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology and a lecturer at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He collaborates with such renowned institutions as the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology, the Royal Łazienki Museum, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, the National Film Archive, the J. Grotowski Institute, and the Theater Institute. He is a producer and performer of theater productions in Poland, Japan, Austria, France, and Germany.
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