Matteo Bittanti

External Specialist

Matteo Bittanti's research focuses on the cultural, social and theoretical aspects of emerging technology, with an emphasis on the interrelations of popular culture, visual culture, and the arts. His primary interest is the social and cultural impact of videogames. His areas of investigation include the intersection between cinema and digital games, forms of consumerism, and popular narratives. He is the editor of videoludica. game culture , a series of books that examine videogames from a broad academic and critical perspective. He is about to receive a Ph.D in New Technologies of Communications from Libera Universita' di Lingue & Comunicazione in Milan, Italy. Previously, he received a M.S. in Mass Communications from San Jose State University, in San Jose California, and a B.A. in Philosophy and Media Studies from University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy. He is also affiliated with the Stanford Humanities Lab and the How They Got Game project .

danah boyd

Graduate Researcher

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Her blog can be found at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts.
Her papers can be found at http://www.danah.org/papers.

Becky Herr Stephenson

Graduate Researcher
Becky Herr Stephenson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication and a graduate fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Her current research interests include media literacy, youth media production, and youth culture. Previously, Becky worked as a production manager for companies producing original content for the web and multimedia museum exhibits. She holds a B.A. in video production from Emerson College (Boston, MA) and a M.A.T. (Master of Arts in Teaching) from the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University.

Heather A. Horst

Postdoctoral Researcher

Heather Horst is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in the materiality of place, space and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project entitled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South" which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica and South Africa. Her co-authored book with Daniel Miller, "The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication" (Oxford and NY: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the digital youth project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces families in Silicon Valley and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Her web site is at https://webfiles.berkeley.edu/~hhorst/

Patricia G. Lange

Postdoctoral Researcher
Patricia G. Lange is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her areas of interest for the digital youth project are centered around using theories from anthropology and linguistics to understand the cultural dynamics of video creation, reception, and exchange among kids and youth. She is studying YouTube as well as video blogging groups to gain insight into the communicative aspects of video sharing. Lange is exploring how the content and form of videos as well as video sharing and response practices serve as sites of identity negotiation, emotional expression, and promotion of public discourse in increasingly video-mediated, online milieu. She has recently published articles in a variety of journals including: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Discourse Studies, Anthropology of Work Review, First Monday, and The Scholar and Feminist Online.

Her video blog, with list of publications, can be found at http://anthrovlog.wordpress.com/
Her video blog on YouTube is at http://www.youtube.com/user/AnthroVlog

Dilan Mahendran

Graduate Researcher

Dilan Mahendran is a fourth year PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. Dilan's academic areas of interest are in Race Critical Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Philosophical Anthropology and Phenomenology. He is also interested in the methodological problems of positivism and naturalism in technology studies and issues of constructivism in the social study of science and technology. Dilan's research areas are centered around the impact of digital technology in hip hop music making. He is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork at the DJ Project, a hip hop music production after school program located in the Mission district of San Francisco and in East Oakland CA. Dilan received his BA in anthropology from Northeastern University and MS from the School of Information UC Berkeley.

Katynka Z. Martínez

Postdoctoral Researcher

Katynka Z. Martínez is Assistant Professor in the Raza Studies Department of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a communication scholar who focuses on Latino media studies and teaches courses on cinema, television, and journalism. As a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Digital Youth project, she engaged in participant observations among media arts educators working with middle school and high school youth in Los Angeles. Katynka conducted home interviews with these students and their parents to better understand how digital media is used outside of school. She is currently working on a study of how Latino youth have used digital media and drawn from pop culture to participate in the current debate regarding immigration to the U.S. She is especially interested in how youth use digital media and create new works that are informed by their experiences navigating through densely populated urban areas of Los Angeles. Examples of this work can be found at: http://iml.usc.edu/laproject/

CJ Pascoe

Postdoctoral Researcher

CJ Pascoe is a sociologist who is interested in gender, sexuality, inequality, social theory, and social change. My book on gender in high school, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School recently received the 2008 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. She is currently researching the ways in which teenagers, their families and social networks navigate digital technology, the internet and new media. In "Living Digital" she examines how teenagers navigate digital technology and how new media has become a central part of contemporary teen culture with a particular focus on teens courtship, romance and intimacy practices. Along with Dr. Natalie Boero she is conducting a study entitled "No Wannarexics Allowed" looking at the formation of online pro-anorexia communities. In the fall of 2008 CJ will be joining the Sociology faculty at Colorado College.

CJ's website can be found at: http://www.coloradocollege.edu/dept/so/Faculty/Pascoe/index.html

Dan Perkel

Graduate Researcher

Dan Perkel is a PhD. candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth graders, ethnographic inquiry into a an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum that looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director forHive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his B.A. (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Masters in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley School of Information in 2005.

Laura Robinson

Postdoctoral Researcher

Laura Robinson studies the comparative cultural use of new media in Brazil, France, and the United States. Her current project examines digital inequality among economically disadvantaged youth. Her study explores the role played by information resources in everyday processes by situating information seeking and media use within respondents' larger social networks and access to resources.

Christo Sims

Graduate Researcher

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He studies the social and human factors that inform the design of computer enabled interfaces and experiences. In 2005, he did ethnographic field work for the Unexpected Collaborations project. In 2006 and 2007 he has worked on two projects which focus on the everyday practices of young people in specific local contexts. The first project is the Media Practices in Rural Landscapes project, which focuses on a community in rural northern California. The second project investigates similar themes but focuses on young people coming of age in Brooklyn, New York. Previously, he produced interactive experiences for Jan Krukowski & Company, a New York City agency specializing in the education and not-for-profit sectors. Christo received my B.A. from Bowdoin College in 2000.

Christo's website can be found at: http://ischool.berkeley.edu/~christo