Patricia G. Lange is an anthropologist and assistant professor of critical studies. Her work focuses on technical identity performance, mediated communication, informal learning, and use of digital video to express the self and accomplish civic engagement. Prior to joining CCA, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She was a core member of the MacArthur-sponsored study called “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures,” which remains one of the most comprehensive studies of kids’ use of digital media in the United States. She co-authored two books that emerged from the study: 1) Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, and 2) Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project, which were both published by The MIT Press.

Lange is recognized as an expert on YouTube, technical identities, and new media literacies. She contributed to several of the earliest scholarly works on YouTube, including The YouTube Reader, and Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube. Lange’s research has focused on how YouTube participants used the site in its early years to express the self, accomplish sociality with amateur video makers, and to establish new forms of community. Her current work focuses on how vernacular video genres such as rant videos and videos about large and small places stimulate and facilitate civic engagement.

Her work has been widely published in numerous journals including: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Anthropology of Work Review, Visual Communication, Games & Culture, Discourse Studies, Enculturation, and Human Organization. Recently she was a keynote speaker at the Transforming Audiences 3 conferences at the University of Westminster in London, and was an invited participant in the Knight Foundation’s Technology for Civic Engagement Summit.

Lange received her master’s and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. She received her master’s in international policy studies and her undergraduate degree in history from Stanford University.

A list of publications may be found at: http://www.patriciaglange.org/

Website: www.patriciaglange.org