About

Tara McPherson, Ph.D., is the HMH Foundation Endowed Chair for the Study of Censorship in Media and a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is also the Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies and a core Ph.D. advisor in the Media Arts + Practice program. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect, and place, with a particular focus on digital media. Her work explores digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. Currently, she is examining the spread of hate through online networks and creating anti-fascist media through The Reclaim Project. McPherson authored the book Feminist in a Software Lab, published by Harvard University Press in 2018, which received the 2018 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities. Her previous work includes Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, which received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award, and she has co-edited several volumes on media and culture. She is a prominent speaker on digital humanities, digital scholarship, youth and media, and gender and technology studies, and has been actively involved in initiatives supporting digital scholarship and pedagogy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Humanities
• History
• Art

Selected publications

• Video Games and Race

  2024-12-05 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access

  Abstract Medical discussions around video games usually revolve around addiction, physical health, mental health outcomes, and even acts of violence. The authors of this chapter want to interject race into these discussions to explore the role that race, racialization, and racism have in conversations about gaming. By exploring the social harms of race in gaming, the authors explore how these emerge, from the radicalization of white youth to the toxic cultures that surround gaming, among others. We argue that significant harms occur also because of the ways in which spaces and technologies are designed that might facilitate the process of these racialized harms. The authors conclude with a list of recommendations and future research that focus on how we could imagine, design, and implement our technologies in ways that challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ruptured times: Advances in visual environmental humanities

  2021

  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • History

• 22 Digital

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• 18 Digital

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Digital Possibilities and the Reimagining of Politics, Place, and the Self: An Introduction

  2019-05-07 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1. Designing for Difference

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2018-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2. Assembling Scholarship: From Vectors to Scalar

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2018-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected

  Directory of Open access Books (OAPEN Foundation) · 2018-03-11 · 70 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How emergent practices and developments in young people's digital media can result in technological innovation or lead to unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social encounters.Young people's use of digital media may result in various innovations and unexpected outcomes, from the use of videogame technologies to create films to the effect of home digital media on family life. This volume examines the core issues that arise when digital media use results in unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social encounters. The contributors examine the complex mix of emergent practices and developments online and elsewhere that empower young users to function as drivers of technological change, recognizing that these new technologies are embedded in larger social systems, school, family, friends. The chapters consider such topics as (un)equal access across economic, racial, and ethnic lines; media panics and social anxieties; policy and Internet protocols; media literacy; citizenship vs. consumption; creativity and collaboration; digital media and gender equity; shifting notions of temporality; and defining the public/private divide. ContributorsSteve Anderson, Anne Balsamo, Justine Cassell, Meg Cramer, Robert A. Heverly, Paula K Hooper, Sonia Livingstone, Henry Lowood, Robert Samuels, Christian Sandvig, Ellen Seiter, Sarita Yardi

  PublisherOA PDF

• Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design

  2018-02-19 · 5 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  For over a dozen years, the Vectors Lab has experimented with digital scholarship through its online publication, Vectors, and through Scalar, a multimedia authoring platform. The history of this software lab intersects a much longer tale about computation in the humanities, as well as tensions about the role of theory in related projects. Tara McPherson considers debates around the role of cultural theory within the digital humanities and addresses Gary Hall's claim that the goals of critical theory and of quantitative or computational analysis may be irreconcilable (or at the very least require "far more time and care"). She then asks what it might mean to design-from conception-digital tools and applications that emerge from contextual concerns of cultural theory and, in particular, from a feminist concern for difference. This path leads back to the Vectors Lab and its ongoing efforts at the intersection of theory and praxis

  PublisherDOI

• Feminist in a Software Lab

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2018-12-31 · 8 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Henry Jenkins

  6 shared

• Kirsten Ostherr

  Rice University

  6 shared

• Elizabeth Losh

  William & Mary

  6 shared

• Patrick Vonderau

  6 shared

• Jason Farman

  University of Maryland, College Park

  6 shared

• Heidi Rae Cooley

  6 shared

• Bo Reimer

  6 shared

• Jane Shattuc

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Cinema and Media Studies

  University of Southern California

• M.A., American Studies

  Duke University

• B.A., American Studies

  University of California, Santa Barbara

Awards & honors

• The Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities (2018)
• John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on…