Douglas Thomas is Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and affiliated faculty at the Center for Robotic and Embedded Systems in the Viterbi School of Engineering and in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota in Communication in 1992 and specializes in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies of Technology. His current research, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Lounsbery Foundation, and the Annenberg Center at USC, focuses on the uses of virtual worlds for education and global civic engagement.
He is founding editor of Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, a quarterly international journal that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. His books include: Hacking Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), a study of the cultural, social, and political dimensions of computer hacking, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (Guilford Press, 1998), an examination of the role of representation in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies (with Marita Sturken and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Temple UP, 2004) and Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age (with Brian D. Loader; Routledge, 2000. His current projects include Power, Play and Performance: Studying Virtual Worlds, an examination of player culture and community in massively multiplayer online games and Play and Politics: Games, Civic Engagement, and Social Activism (with Josh Fouts). Professor Thomas is a founding member of the Critical and Cultural Studies division of the National Communication Association and has served as Chair of the division, serves on the advisory board for the Research Center for Cyberculture Studies at the University of Washington, Games for Change, Games, Learning and Society at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Sciences and Technology Advanced Collabratory) at Duke Univerity and Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology 2007, Salzburg. He is currently Vice-President of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and Program Co-chair for the ACM/SIGGRAPH Video Game Symposium and Program Co-chair for DiGRA 2007 (Tokyo). He has testified before the U.S. Congress on issues of computer hacking, cyberterrorism, and critical infrastructure protection.
Anne Balsamo's work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer, and entrepreneur. She is currently a Full Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications. She is the PI on a new MacArthur Foundation grant on the future of libraries and museums in a digital age. From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC where she created one of the first academic programs in multimedia literacy across the curriculum. In 2002, she co-founded, Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Here she was involved in the creation of novel interactives for clients such as Sun Microsystems, the Liberty Science Center, Singapore Science Center, and the Papalote Children’s Museum in Mexico City. Previously she was a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents), a collaborative research-design group at Xerox PARC who created experimental reading devices and new media genres. She served as project manager and new media designer for the development of RED's interactive museum exhibit, XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading that toured Science/Technology Museums in the U.S. from 2000-2003. Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke UP, 1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent bio-technologies. Her new book Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke UP, forthcoming) examines the relationship between thetechnological imagination, cultural reproduction and technological innovation.
Yasmin B. Kafai is a professor of the learning sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She undertook her studies on learning theories and technologies in France, Germany, and the United States and received her doctorate from Harvard University while conducting research at the MIT Media Laboratory. Her research examines learning cultures and equity issues in school classrooms, community centers, and virtual worlds. She is exploring new ways to organize learning environments and technologies that engage youth as critical, creative, and reflective participants and designers of digital media. Her books include “Minds in Play: Computer Game Design as a Context for Learning” (1995) and the co-edited publications of “Constructionism in Practice” (1996), “Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming” (2008, MIT Press) and the upcoming “The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities” (2009, Teachers College Press).