Welcome to my web page. I am a Canadian transplant in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I currently serve as Associate Professor of Digital Media at North Carolina State University, and director of the PhD program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media.

I am interested in serious leisure cultures and the many forms of communication and work that sustain them, and I am committed to making them more equitable and just. This is carried out through the application of critical, qualitative and participatory research methods, and through intersdisciplinary collaboration with scholars primarily in Canada and the US.

I am the lead editor (with Gerald Voorhees) of Masculinities in Play (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which is the first edited volume to explore the many connections between contemporary masculinities and digital games. I am also the lead editor (with Chris Ingraham) of LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media (Bloomsbury, 2020) which explores the activities of artists and hobbyists who treat LEGO as their creative medium.

I am currently working on a book project that pulls together my ethnographic research with gaming communities over the last decade, into an account of the connections between masculinity, place, and digital play. This work encompasses everything my early fieldwork on grassroots competitive gaming in Toronto, to my recent research into how North American universities ‘make space’ for collegiate esports on their campuses.

You can find more of my recent work in Critical Studies in Media CommunicationGames and Culture, Convergence, Game Studies, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

At NC State, I teach undergraduate courses in communication and media studies at both the introductory level (Communication and Technology, Critical Approaches to Communication Media) and specialized topics (Mediated Masculinities and Game Studies). My graduate course offerings include required courses in qualitative and critical / interpretive methods, PhD-level seminars in pedagogy and technology, and special topics courses for advanced level graduate students (including Gaming and Social Networks and a graduate version of Mediated Masculinities).

In addition to my stewardship of CRDM, an internationally recognized interdisciplinary PhD program, I also co-direct the Circuit Studio, a digital media research lab and makerspace at NC State, and I serve as faculty advisor for two student esports clubs. As of Fall 2021, I am a member of the advisory board for the Riot Scholastic Association of America. Uniting all these forms of academic service and leadership is a concern with creating more equitable conditions for participation in media cultures, and with confronting the structural and cultural inequalities that continue to shape post-secondary education.

My CV is available here and I am on Twitter (almost exclusively during conferences) here.