Workshops

Diversity, equity, and inclusion aren’t abstract principles. Neither is game design. They begin and end with real people’s real-life experiences. Whether you’re an indie game design studio or a corporate marketing department, an in-person or online workshop can transform a daunting concept like cultural sensitivity, implicit bias, or identity-affirming character design into practical, hands-on experience in a matter of hours, either in person or via video conference software.

Below you’ll find descriptions of some of the workshops I offer through Mendez Consulting LLC. They’re fast-paced and heavy on audience participation, because I want to give you the chance not only to learn, but also to put what you’ve learned into practice. All workshops incorporate an overview of a topic, a question-and-answer or audience contribution phase which allows facilitators to respond to your team’s particular concerns and challenges, and a practicum during which we employ the skills and information we’ve just learned in a small-group setting. You’ll leave with new perspectives on a challenging topic and action items you can immediately apply to your work going forward.

For more information or to book a session, please fill out this form. Also, if you don’t see exactly what you want but you’re interested in a related topic, hit me up anyway—I love customizing workshops or creating new topics based on clients’ needs.

Introduction to Cultural Consulting

A cultural consultant, also known as a sensitivity reader, is a professional who helps other creatives represent diverse and marginalized identities with authenticity and respect. Cultural consultants have diverse specialties across the spectrum of identities, and may or may not also have experience doing personnel- and organization-focused DEI consulting.

Cultural consultation is a relatively young field. Your team may not have heard of cultural consultants, or know how to reach out to or work with them. You may not even have room in your current budget to bring on a cultural consultant. But creating media that affirms the full spectrum of human identity is everyone’s job—and this workshop can start your team down the path to learning it.

In this workshop, your team will learn …

• What a cultural consultant is, and what our work looks like

• How to recognize diversity, equity, and inclusion crises and opportunities in your own and others’ creations

• The most common mistakes creators in your field make with regard to DEI, and how to make cultural consultants’ jobs easier by avoiding them

• How to give intense feedback while taking your recipient’s feelings into account

• How to take feedback gracefully

• How to perform cultural editing, reducing harm and seizing opportunities in your own or others’ work while navigating creative constraints

• How to reach out to cultural consultants and include us in your workflow

You’ll leave the workshop with a better understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion in your work, ready to use your creative talents to avert harm and affirm marginalized identities, and prepared to work with professional cultural consultants.

Cultural Consulting Hard Mode: Game Design Trash Fire Makeovers

In the advanced variant of this workshop, aimed at teams with a solid grounding in creative DEI, we focus the entire workshop on revising published examples of failures in diverse, equitable, and inclusive content. Participants break into small groups and practice giving constructive criticism to a facilitator who takes on the role of the problematic piece’s author, communicating DEI priorities while taking their recipient’s emotional sensitivity into account. Then, groups try their hands at reworking the materials to reduce harm and affirm marginalized identities, while navigating creative restrictions that simulate corporate mandates. You’ll need patience, empathy, and a sense of humor to put your nascent cultural consulting skills to the test; but this is one of the most fun workshops I facilitate, for facilitators as well as participants.

Diverse Character Design

Let’s dive deep into creative media’s most important field for diversity, equity, and inclusion work: character design. It’s not enough just to represent characters from diverse backgrounds with dignity and respect—that’s just where it starts. You don’t have to settle for that. The characters you create can be affirming and validating, the kind who make people from underrepresented backgrounds proud and happy to consume your work and recommend it to others. This isn’t just about avoiding criticism; this is the kind of work that changes lives.

In this workshop, you’ll learn the theory and practice of character design as it applies to the medium of your choice, including how that craft changes whether it’s the main character of a video game, a non-player character in a tabletop role-playing game, the protagonist of a novel, or the villain of a film. You’ll practice applying what you learn in text or visual formats, and how to adapt identity signifiers based on whether you have the length of an ongoing comic or a single playing card to work with, an ensemble cast or a lone hero.

We’ll cover the difference between …

• representation and tokenism

• identity signifiers and harmful stereotypes

• themes and plotlines anyone can write, and those best left to own-voices work

• appreciation and appropriation

• expressing hard truths and exploiting trauma and suffering

• when to go it alone, and when to bring in a cultural consultant

Whether you’re studying how to convey your own experiences of marginalization to people who have never encountered anything like them, or venturing out from your comfort zone for the first time, you’ll leave this workshop flush with confidence and ideas you can take into your own work.

Fantasy Races and Fantastic Racism

From orcs to talking animals and gargoyles to robots, human-like sapient species appear all over speculative fiction. In stories about demographic conflict, bigotry, and oppression, they often stand in as allegories for differences between human populations in the real world. But this sort of story is one of the hardest to tell if you want to do right by marginalized people in the real world. All too often, stories intended to highlight and teach about subaltern struggles end up minimizing, obscuring, or misrepresenting them instead, even in the hands of seasoned storytellers.

This workshop boils the long history of allegorical racism and systemic oppression in science fiction and fantasy into a fast-paced, solutions-focused form. In this workshop, you’ll answer tough questions like …

• What principles govern a responsible allegory about racism?

• How does the characterization of fantasy races point towards real-world humans, intentionally or otherwise?

• How can I represent the diversity of human ethnicity while simultaneously telling an allegorical story?

• Is it better to lean into cultural signifiers in a species’s traits, or try to abstract them away from humanity?

You will leave this workshop with greater insight into the relationship between systemic oppression and creative media, empowered to tell stories about vulnerable people in ways which make the most out of speculative fiction, without causing harm.

How Do You Do, Generation Z?

with Kade Leous and Mary Rose Valentine

Now for a weird one. As you may have noticed, Generation Z’s mode of communication has some interesting idiosyncracies. I’m not just talking about memes or slang, either—you already know how to Google those. Using complex, subtle combinations of intentional and implicit signals, Gen Z shares important information about identity, interests, and values. If you work in any kind of business communication field where you liaise with young people, you need to understand these systems—and the best way to do that is to talk to them. This workshop, with real live facilitators from Gen Z, offers you that opportunity.

In this workshop, you will learn …

• How ethical and political values inform Gen Z’s æsthetic sensibilities, and vice versa

• What kind of symbols, ranging from word choice and sentence structure to imagery, communicate information about identity categories or political affiliation

• How these structures protect individuals from real-world harassment and danger

• How modern communication helps to regulate and moderate online spaces like Discord servers or gaming guilds, maintaining community norms and correcting bad behavior

• How to craft corporate messaging which sounds authentic and trustworthy to young people (spoiler alert: it usually doesn’t involve trying to sound like them, or memes, or skateboards)

For Generation Z, this kind of precision-targeted communication isn’t just about looking cool or making someone laugh (though it can do that). It’s a way to express your values, find out whether others share them, and ward off trolls and bad actors—individual or corporate—who might harm you and those you care about. This workshop could help you keep up.

Tokenism, Virtue Signaling, and Appropriation

This workshop focuses on some of the most controversial and misunderstood concepts in diversity, equity, and inclusion: specifically, on ways in which the positive impulse to diversify representation can go wrong. Tokenism occurs when diverse identities are shown in media without being centered in the narrative or given authentic voice. Virtue signaling occurs when an entity puts on the appearance of diversity or progressivism without substantial action behind that appearance. Cultural appropriation occurs when members of a dominant culture adopt a marginalized population’s signifiers and practices in a way that exacerbates an existing gulf in power. These issues are real and potentially harmful, but fear of them should never hold you back from diversifying your work.

In this workshop, we’ll explore …

• How good representation can take wrong turns into tokenism, virtue signaling, and appropriation

• What kind of positive practices and principles insulate our work against these problems and accusations thereof

• How to center and protagonize subaltern narratives to combat tokenism

• How to describe and pitch your work in a way that gives others confidence in its substance and diversity

• How to assess the complex power dynamics that can make an instance of cultural exchange appropriative

• How to recognize bad-faith criticisms on these grounds, from bad actors who oppose DEI

This workshop is an excellent choice for a team with a solid grounding in the basics of DEI, hoping to delve into the technical details of the field’s most intimidating challenges.

Workshop Logistics

• Workshops can run for two hours, four hours, or seven hours, split into two halves with a short break in the middle.

  • The longer variants of the workshops incorporate more extensive question-and-answer time, more in-depth and realistic practice and feedback thereon during the practicum, and more customized content based on your team’s field and particular challenges.

  • If you’re not sure what length of workshop you want, four hours is a safe bet.

• The two halves can take place on the same day, or on different days to give people time to process and come up with questions in between.

• Workshops have no minimum size, and can accommodate up to 60 participants. If you have more than 60, that’s cool too, I just probably want to bring on a co-facilitator.

• Online workshops can take place over Zoom, Discord, or other videoconferencing software.

• In-person workshops need chairs and tables for all participants, so they can break into small groups, converse, and write things. The presenter should probably have a microphone and a screen for slides, but can make do without. Participants should bring something to take notes with like a notebook or laptop.