Document Type
Presentation
Date
2-27-2026
Language
English
Disciplines
Digital Humanities
Description/Abstract
Dolls of Our World is a geography game from around the 1950s in SCRC’s Plastics Artifacts Collection in which the player matches a doll to their flag based off outfit and short description. I wanted to know why Africa was not included, and overall, how geography games and teaching diversity have changed. I read several papers, including on plastic-color technology and the history of Black dolls. According to the categorization of “Gamification & Geography Education: A Survey & Typology of Games,” Dolls of Our World uses a storytelling narrative to teach, seen with the clothes and incorporation of people (however stereotyped). What I’m familiar with, the website Seterra, is location-based, with technical information such as maps and in comparison, is removed from the social element. While there is some argument to be made on injection molding color constraints (consistency vs customization), it is more likely that Black audiences were not prioritized. Shindana Toys, founded in 1968, was a groundbreaker for this, as their ethnically correct dolls (among the first) were quite popular, showing there was a profitable market. Teaching diversity has had a nonlinear path, with rare cases of seemingly modern global awareness as shown in the curriculum quote and given the instability of diversity education in the classroom today. There are still several questions pertaining to the Dolls themselves, such as references for their “native costumes.”
Recommended Citation
Warren, Linnea, "Evolving From Stereotyping to Diversity" (2026). SOURCE Explore Program. 13.
https://surface.syr.edu/source/13
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
