Benjamin Stokes
I am a civic media scholar and strategist. From games to mapping, for civic engagement.

Investigating:
  • "Civic Learning" through games, mobile media and mapping: teaching civic skills and building neighborhood capacity, especially in the physical world with community organizations, using design research
  • Regional communication ecology: the networks necessary for neighborhood development, including strategic storytelling networks, and inter-group relations
 Benjamin Stokes
On Twitter @bgstokes.
This page is a professional stub based on my work at USC Annenberg; see elsewhere for the rest of my life.
Current Projects: Recently I have been investigating how mobile situates engagement in the physical world with the ParTour project in the Mobile Lab led by Francois Bar; how direct action games reshape civic participation in the Game Innovation Lab led by Tracy Fullerton; mapping geo-ethnic communication ecologies with the Metamorphosis project led by Sandra Ball-Rokeach; and across all this, theorizing about new trajectories from participatory culture to civic life in Henry Jenkins' Civic Paths group.

Background: I co-founded Games for Change in 2004, and continue to help build the field of social issue games. Previously, I was a program officer at the MacArthur Foundation in their Digital Media and Learning portfolio with Connie Yowell. I have managed programs at NetAid/Mercy Corps in gaming, online volunteering, and online peer learning for global citizenship (now the Global Citizen Corps). Working in educational technology, I was a producer at ProQuest/Bigchalk.com, which reached more than 43,000 schools. I have developed digital games (see Peter Packet Challenge) and learning communities that engaged more than 150,000 youth in fighting extreme poverty. I studied the single atom wire for my B.A. in physics at Haverford College, and also studied in Senegal.

If you need to reach me by email, please write bstokes@usc.edu. Occasionally I post photographs on Flickr. My projects and writings are occasionally archived on an infrequent blog. My research is based at USC Annenberg, where I am a PhD student in Communication and Journalism.

* Photo credit: Ida Benedetto