Culture Digitally // Examining Contemporary Cultural Production

Guest Contributors

Culture Digitally would like to thank all of the contributors to this blog.

Adam Fish is a cultural anthropologist and media studies scholar currently lecturing in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. He investigates the interface of economic and political power, cultural discourses and practices, and networked communication technologies. These interests coalesce into critical and ethnographic investigations into digital culture, media policy, television and internet convergence, and network activism. @mediacultures

Brooke Erin Duffy is an Assistant Professor in Temple University’s School of Communications and Theater’s Department of Advertising and a faculty member in the Mass Media and Communication Doctoral Program.

Burcu S. Bakioglu received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. She examines the interaction between media environments, uses of media technologies, and cultural effects of technology in the convergence era. Focusing on the tactical and disruptive uses of media, she researches Internet message boards, griefing groups in virtual worlds, hacktivism, ARGs, and transmedia storytelling. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in New Media at Lawrence University

Christina Dunbar-Hester is assistant professor of Journalism & Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University.  Her research centers around politics in activist technical communities, and has appeared in such venues as Social Studies of Science,New Media & Society, and the Journal of Communication Inquiry.  She is developing a book manuscript on low-power radio activism and conducting NSF-supported ethnographic research on efforts to promote diversity in FLOSS.  She has also written on technology and culture in The Atlantic‘s Technology Channel.

Christopher Boulton’s primary research areas are the critical study of advertising and consumer culture, media literacy, and documentary. He is finishing a dissertation on race inequality inside the U.S. advertising industry and will be Assistant Professor of Broadcast/Convergence Media in the Department of Communication at the University of Tampa come fall.

C.W. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and Director of Research at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His first book, “Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age,” chronicles the evolution of the Philadelphia media ecosystem from 1997 to 2012. His current research focus on the materialities of journalistic evidence; in particular, the manner by which cultural understandings of documents and data have intersected with shifting newsroom epistemologies.

Dawn Nafus is an anthropologist with Intel Labs, where she conducts ethnographic research to inform new product development and strategy. She holds a PhD from University of Cambridge and has research interests in various aspects of the anthropology of technology, including experiences of temporality, notions of development, gender, and numeracies as material and cultural forms.

Rayvon Fouché is an associate professor of history and an associate professor at the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Fouché’s current book project examines the relationships between sport, science, and technology with an eye toward understanding what is at stake for sporting cultures when they define themselves by and against new and emerging scientific knowledge and technological artifacts.

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Kreiss’s research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press — “Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama” — he presents the untold history of new media and Democratic political campaigning over the last decade. The book follows the work of a group of young internet staffers who came together on the Dean campaign and created a number of innovations in online campaigning. After the elections, Dean’s former staffers launched prominent political consulting firms that carried their innovations to many other campaigns, including Obama’s bid for the presidency.  In addition to this work, Kreiss’s research on new media and democratic practice has appeared in “New Media & Society,” “Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change,” “Critical Studies in Media Communication,” the “Journal of Information Technology and Politics,” and the “International Journal of Communication,” among other academic journals.  Kreiss is an affiliate fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University.

Daren C. Brabham is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and a faculty fellow in the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among the first to publish research on the crowdsourcing model, his work on online communities and new media has appeared in Convergence; First Monday; Information, Communication & Society; Planning Theory; and The Participatory Cultures Handbook. He is the founding editor of Case Studies in Strategic Communication, and he teaches courses in new media, public relations, and writing at UNC.

Gabriella Coleman researches and teaches on computer hackers and digital activism. Her forthcoming book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, is out this fall with Princeton University Press. She holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, at McGill University in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies.

Ilana Gershon is an Assistant Professor, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University.

Jennifer Lena is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College and author of Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton 2012). She regularly blogs at http://whatisthewhat.wordpress.com/ and has guest blogged at http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/.

Jessica L. Beyer received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington.  She is currently a postdoc in the Center for Global Studies at the University of Washington’s Jackson School for International Studies.  Her research uses ethnographic methods to understand online communities and recent work has focused on sustained political action arising from highly populated social websites.

Lonny J Avi Brooks is assistant professor in the Communication Department at California State University, East Bay. His current manuscript is Playing@Work:Performing Future Scenarios of 21st Century life at the Institute For The Future (in review at MIT Press). His research of IFTF is part of a larger study of futurist think tanks worldwide to investigate the metaphors employed in future scenarios of computing as they interact with historical, sociocultural memories, and present-day realities.  As part of his research on emergent trends in social computing and user experience research, he investigates how online gaming is being implemented in higher education and as a platform for understanding how gaming can provide students with immersive experiences in learning about media theory and practice.Professor Brooks received his PhD in Communication at UC San Diego and an MA in Library and Information Science at UCLA. He is currently Chair of the Communication And The Future (CATF) division of the National Communication Association. He advises students in advertising, public relations and organizational communication and is Chair of the Jewish Culture & Society Committee at Cal State East Bay.

Mark Chen is a postdoc at the University of Washington in the LIFE Center and the Center for Game Science looking at player learning with science and math games such as Foldit and Refraction. He is also helping the Educurious project by integrating games and gameplay into the redesign of high school biology, English, and algebra. He has a new book out based on his dissertation work on learning in online games titled Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. Prior to doctoral work, Mark was the webmaster and a web game developer for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

Mark Deuze is an academic, interested in media and social theory, creative industries, and extreme metal. Hailing from Holland, Mark lives and works in Indiana.

Mélanie Millette has a PhD from UQAM in Montreal, Canada.  She is a member of the research team at LabCMO and a Fellow at the Foundation Trudeau.

Mel Stanfill is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Stanfill’s work examines the changing relationship between media companies and their fans in the Internet era, considering both cult media fans and sports fans through representations of fans, the design of official websites for media properties (television shows, sports franchises, etc.), and interviews with media industry practitioners.

Neal Thomas is an assistant professor of communication studies at UNC Chapel Hill. With interests that lie at the intersection of social computing and social theory, his recent work focuses on web 2.0 techniques and their capacity to produce discursive rationality, reading the computer user as both experiential and ideological subject in this light.

Ted Striphas is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication & Culture, Indiana University.  In 2009 he published a book called The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control.  His latest book project focuses on algorithmic culture.

Torin Monahan is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on institutional transformations with new technologies, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which surveillance and security programs tend to reproduce social inequalities. Currently, he is overseeing an NSF-funded collaborative research project on the data-sharing practices of Department of Homeland Security “fusion centers.”

Zachary McDowell’s research focuses on cultural production in digital space, often brushing up against questions of access and use. A Wikipedia Teaching Fellow, he not only researches digitally mediated collaboration but also strives to critically engage students through it. Zach is currently working on his dissertation, a media archaeology of the mashup, a case study on the role of digital sharing in cultural production.