Robert Mejia

North Dakota State University | NDSU · Department of Communication

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted relationships between hegemonic sensory perceptions and disease epistemologies. The affective pedagogies of the COVID-19 sensorium signal vectors and victims of disease through racialized, classed, and gendered assemblages of sensory presence and absence. Present sounds of weaponized coughing suture white consumerist e...

Survival has always been intersectional—raced, classed, gendered, sexed, (dis)abled, and colonized—and if we are to survive this twenty-first century, we need scholars with the experience and training to be at the forefront of the field of communication and critical/cultural studies. Hence, the field needs to take seriously the production of organi...

Casual games disrupted the games industry, but not in ways commonly believed. What if we left behind the hardcore vs. casual games dichotomy to reveal that casual gameplay and casual game development have extended the neoliberal and neocolonial logic of the industry? Casual games, in terms of design and industry practices, remind us that there is n...

If art institutions are sites of control for the powerful and sites of struggle for the powerless, then we should understand how different modes of art funding transform these spaces into ideological state apparatuses and the type of platform it offers (or does not offer). By analyzing two commercial art galleries and four museums, we argue that pu...

In the aftermath of the 2016 election of President Trump, a veritable cottage industry of opinion pieces, blogs, and articles emerged overnight, most of which seemed to agree that only the posttruth could explain how a racist, misogynistic, neo-nationalist member of the economic elite could win a presidential election. This article, in contrast, is...

This chapter offers a historical analysis of how graphical trends in the video game industry affect the gender and sexual politics of video game representation. Our interest in graphical trends means that we are less interested in specific visual representations but rather the broader question of visual regimes. To this end, this chapter first expl...

In this paper, we argue that EVE Online is a fruitful site for exploring how the representational and political-economic elements of science fiction intersect to exert a sociocultural and political-economic force on the shape and nature of the future-present. EVE has been oft heralded for its economic and sociocultural complexity, and for employing...

Drawing on a theoretical background that connects visuality to the construction of power relations, this chapter provides a representational analysis of Deliver the Nets and ultimately argues that, as a serious game, Deliver the Nets portrays Africa as a faceless continent outside of history. It provides an easy route to the eradication of serious...

On March 17, 2010, the United States Federal Communications Commission identified broadband as “the great infrastructure challenge of the early twenty-first century.” One month earlier, on February 10, 2010, in anticipation of the FCC's announcement, Google announced its intent to build ultra-high-speed broadband networks across the United States t...

This article analyzes Free Rice within the context of “the rise of the ludic sublime,” where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of “philitainment,” Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed “communicative capitalism” and t...

Interpersonal synchrony is a communicative lubricant that is associated with harmonious communication among conversational participants and is believed to be evidence of like‐mindedness and interpersonal solidarity. In this secondary analysis of an existing data set of both power‐equal and power‐unequal couples working through a discussion task, th...

Project LifeLike refers to the efforts to create a ‘realistic avatar supported by an intelligent engine capable of online learning’. In essence, this means the encoding of the intelligence of presently living individuals in order to preserve the persons’ epistemological structures beyond their ontological death. To do this, the team must distil tho...