Dissertation Prospectus

In October 2011 I will defend the prospectus for my dissertation, “The Perky Pug,” which examines negotiations among key actants with regard to "constitutional" interventions into the governance of virtual worlds.

Using tools of legal and rhetorical analysis in addition to "deep description" from extensive participant-observer ethnographic work in a range of online communities, my dissertation will argue that the "magic circle" held to separate online and offline practices is actually a contested "borderlands" in which online and offline values, behaviors and techniques are deployed to rapidly prototype, field and test new tools of governance, which have direct implications for political practices in the ofline as well as online world.

Comprehensive Examinations

Passed Spring 2011. Fields:
Science and Technology Studies
Anthropology of Online Communities
New Media and Educational Design

Second Year Project

Second Year Research Presentation, September 2010

For my department's second year project requirement, I spent nine months as a participant-observer in the Second Life ™ virtual world, in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators and the Virtual Democracy of Al Andalus, as an active political participant while the communities split over a set of issues involving cross-cultural misunderstandings and ideological conflicts.

My project paper argued that disputes over the nature of democracy had their roots in the national-political cultures of origin of the activists, using discourse analysis (Gee 2005) to explore how divergent understandings of "democracy," "citizen," "participation" and other key concepts led to the termination of a merger between the two communities.

I believe this case has significant implications for globalized teamwork, online community formation and for explaining the growing popularity of managerial over civic models in voluntary associations.