Elyse Janish

Elyse Janish holds her Master’s degree in Communication from Syracuse University and will be completing her doctorate in Communication from the University of Colorado Boulder in July 2019. She studies digital culture as a communicative phenomenon, focusing on how issues of power and identity play out in digital communities such as online gaming, Twitter, and more. She has several publications in academic journals and edited volumes, and also works to connect scholars with developers in the game design industry to bridge the academic/industry divide.

Elyse teaches classes at CU Boulder on Gender and Communication, and regularly guest lectures in other Communication courses about media, gaming, and technology as it relates to communication and identity. She has organized and led roundtables at academic conferences on ways that national organizations can embrace technological means for making their conventions more accessible and inclusive spaces. Her currently ongoing research project revolves around gender and identity in e-sports (professional video game tournaments), and she is spearheading a new collaborative project to record experiences of queer and feminist game players in order to capture non-hegemonic articulations of the relationship between bodies, technologies, and play.