Douglas Thomas

Douglas Thomas has been a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California since 1993. He is the author or editor of five books, including his most recent work A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (with co-author John Seely Brown).During his time at USC, he has focused his research on radical cultures of learning at the intersections of technology and culture, beginning with the underground worlds of computer hackers and virus writers. He has studied the open source programming community as well as a decade long ethnographic research project of the culture learning in and around computer games.In addition to studying gamers and gamer culture, Professor Thomas worked with colleagues at USC and Indiana University to design and produce two educational video games as well: The Redistricting Game (with Chris Swain, USC) that allowed players to understand and analyze the inner workings of political redistricting and gerrymandering and Modern Prometheus (with Sasha Barab, IU), an interactive retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which helped students understand and analyze ethical decision making in the world of technology and science.His research has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Lounsbery Foundation, and the Annenberg Center at USC, and focuses on the transformation of learning, knowledge, education and global civic engagement in the digital age.  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.