About

Patrick Burkart is a professor affiliated with the College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts at Texas A&M University, with a courtesy appointment in Visualization and a professorship in Communication. His research and academic interests are centered around visualization, as indicated by his faculty affiliation. He is associated with the Center of Digital Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. His contact email is pburkart@tamu.edu, and he is based at the address 797 Lamar St. OMB 202, College Station, TX 77843. His work involves interdisciplinary approaches within the arts and digital humanities, contributing to the fields of performance, visualization, and fine arts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Media studies
• Political Science
• Art
• Internet privacy
• History
• Business
• Law
• Visual arts
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Review of: "Understanding the 2024 Summer Riots in the UK: Three Case Studies"

  2025-06-23

  peer-reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pirate Protest Music

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-02-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The emergence of P2P technologies has reconfigured the relationship between protest and music by politicizing the modes of music distribution. Protest music has indeed always relied on alternative distribution networks. Still, the ideological significance attributed to open P2P networks and pirate radio channels defines the mode of distribution itself as liberating, regardless of the content that is distributed. If previous music movements have aimed to achieve something outside itself—peace, equality, freedom—then the piracy movement essentially sees the freedom of distribution as a means to its own end. This movement has been countered by a growing range of legal and commercial streaming services controlled by the music industry. At the same time, new technologies have enabled other alternative distribution networks. This chapter discusses the digital radio piracy collective Noisebridge against a long history of media piracy and renegade radio networks to highlight the inherent connection between hacking, piracy, and alternative media distribution.

  PublisherDOI

• Political Economy

  2025-06-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter provides an example of the use of international political economy of communication as a research method and practical theory for researching changing information policies around copyright and digital music distribution. He selects a subject of study, the Swedish Pirate Party, which illuminates how an identity-based youth movement organized around music file sharing sprung up in response to an otherwise boring piece of intellectual property rights law which was due to be implemented in Sweden and throughout the European Union. The Swedish Pirate Party itself metastasized into an international movement, with spin-off groups forming and winning elections at the European Parliament, and in national, regional, and local elections in Europe. Burkart demonstrates how political economy, as a research-based theory of social conflict, opens avenues useful for cultural studies and policy studies alike, while evaluating the radical potentials of pirate politics to influence cultural policies and electoral systems throughout the world.

  PublisherDOI

• Getting to yes: An interview with Igor Vamos

  International Journal of Cultural Studies · 2023-01-29 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Patrick Burkart, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture, interviews Dr Igor Vamos, member of The Yes Men and Professor of Art at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, USA. Dr Burkart and Dr Vamos discuss the formative years of experimentation with art and politics which informed Dr Vamos’s vision for The Yes Men's environmental activism and the prospects for an ecological politics.

  PublisherDOI

• 19 Customer Relationship Management: Automating Fandom in Music Communities

  New York University Press eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• White Supremacist Terrorism in Charlottesville: Reconstructing ‘Unite the Right’

  Studies in Conflict and Terrorism · 2021 · 46 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract The “Unite the Right” rally that subsumed Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 will be remembered for its haunting torch-lit rally, massive display of neo-Nazi and white nationalist paraphernalia, bloody riots, and murderous car attack. Despite extensive media coverage, a comprehensive, scholarly, synthetic study of the planning and execution of the Unite the Right (UtR) has yet to emerge. Drawing from a repository of 5,000 primary texts and digital artifacts and using the lens of symbolic interactionism and levels of analysis theory, this study details the event as manifested in three theatres: symbolically mediated, systems-technical, and physical. Three findings are discussed: first, the “event” was centrally organized as a simulacrum of a military campaign; second, the agitational propaganda and information warfare was extensive and designed to publicize, recruit, and terrorize; and third, the city of Charlottesville suffered two cyber-attacks timed for meaningful symbolic interaction with movement actors and public officials. Based on these three findings, the authors offer the term “immersive terrorism” to describe the extended, trans-mediated, multi-theatre nature of the UtR terror campaign.

  PublisherDOI

• Why Hackers Win

  University of California Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Why Hackers Win

  2019-11-01 · 12 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Why Hackers Win: Power and Disruption in the Network Society

  2019-11-26 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  "When people think of hackers, they usually think of a lone wolf acting with the intent to garner personal data for identity theft and fraud. But what about the corporations and government entities that use hacking as a strategy for managing risk? Why Hackers Win asks the pivotal question of how and why the instrumental uses of invasive software by corporations and government agencies contribute to social change. Through a critical communication and media studies lens, the book focuses on the struggles of breaking and defending the 'trusted systems' underlying our everyday use of technology. It compares the United States and the European Union, exploring how cybersecurity and hacking accelerate each other in digital capitalism, and how the competitive advantage that hackers can provide corporations and governments may actually afford new venues for commodity development and exchange. Presenting prominent case studies of communication law and policy, corporate hacks, and key players in the global cybersecurity market, the book proposes a political economic model of new markets for software vulnerabilities and exploits, and clearly illustrates the social functions of hacking."--

  PublisherDOI

• The Spotification of public service media

  The Information Society · 2019-05-12 · 15 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article investigates contemporary cultural policy reforms enabled by paid digital media distribution services, taking the case of the integration of Spotify into the Swedish public media system. Specifically, it reflects on the conflicts arising over the prioritization of digital distribution over cultural preservation, during the gradual substitution of the Spotify digital services for the services provided by the traditional material media archive, the Grammofonarkivet. It considers the factors influencing changes in the Swedish cultural policy environment and the nature of the complaints and human rights claims made by employees of the Grammofonarkivet to UNESCO regarding its structural transformation. It also postulates a “Spotification” model of public service media emerging in Sweden but potentially affecting other countries with public media systems served by traditional media archives.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jonas Andersson Schwarz

  10 shared

• Tom McCourt

  8 shared

• Joel O. Iverson

  University of Montana

  5 shared

• Miyase Christensen

  5 shared

• Nabeel Zuberi

  University of Auckland

  3 shared

• Mehdi Semati

  3 shared

• Gabriella Coleman

  Universitas Pelita Bangsa

  2 shared

• Christopher Joseph Westgate

  Johnson & Wales University

  2 shared