Adrienne Massanari Assoc Professor School of Communication

Degrees: PhD, University of Washington
MA, University of Washington
BA, Guilford College
Bio: Dr. Adrienne L. Massanari is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at American University. Prior to joining AU she was Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and affiliate faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include digital culture, online communities, platform politics, game studies, pop culture, and gender and race online.

She is currently working on a book for MIT Press (Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Alt-Right) that discusses how Silicon Valley’s culture and politics contributed to the rise of the alt-right. Her 2015 book, Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit (Peter Lang), explored the unique culture of Reddit.com. Massanari’s work has appeared in New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, Social Media + Society, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, and First Monday. She serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Sociotechnical Critique (open-access) and New Review of Hypermedia & Multimedia.

Before joining UIC, she was at Loyola University Chicago and served as the Director for the School of Communication’s Center for Digital Ethics and Policy. She also has over ten years of experience working as a user-interface designer, usability consultant, and information architect in corporate and educational settings.

Selected publications
Massanari, A. L. (2020). Reddit’s Alt-Right: Toxic Masculinity, Free Speech, and/r/The_Donald. In M. Zimdars & K. McLeod (Eds.) Fake News: Understanding media and misinformation in the digital age (pp. 179-190).

Massanari, A. L. (2018). Rethinking research ethics, power, and the risk of visibility in the era of the “alt-right” gaze. Ethic as method in the era of Big Data (A. Markham & A. Herman, Eds). Special issue of Social Media + Society. Available online: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305118768302

Massanari, A. L. & Chess, S. (2018). Attack of the 50-Foot Social Justice Warrior: The discursive construction of SJWs in “alt-right” media. Online Misogyny (D. Ging & E. Siapera, Eds). Special issue of Feminist Media Studies. Available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447333

Massanari, A. L. (2017). “Come for the period comics. Stay for the cultural awareness.”: Reclaiming the troll identity through feminist humor on Reddit’s /r/TrollXChromosomes. Feminist Media Studies. Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2017.1414863

Massanari, A. L. (2016). Contested play: The culture and politics of Reddit bots. In R. Gehl and M. Bakardjieva’s (Eds.) Socialbots and their friends: Digital media and the automation of sociality (pp. 110-127). New York: Routledge.

Massanari, A. L. (2015). #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, community, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society. Available online: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/07/1461444815608807

Massanari, A. L. (2015). Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa): Possibilities for participatory game design. Well-Played, 4(3). Available online: http://press.etc.cmu.edu/content/volume-4-number-3-diversity-games

See Also: Website; Google Scholar profile; @hegemonyrules
For the Media: To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.; AU Experts

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Adrienne Massanari Assoc Professor School of Communication

Teaching

Fall 2022

Spring 2023