Javon Goard obtained a BA in sociology with honors from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his master’s in informatics from Indiana University at Bloomington. Goard’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach in studying aspects of video game culture by working in the domains of sociology, informatics, and media studies. His current work focuses on African American/Blacks within the fighting video game community. His blog, jstonee.wordpress.com, bridges the gap between academic discourse and personal anecdotes, discussing a wide range of topics from gender, race, and economics as they relate to virtual spaces. Goard is the Academic Program Coordinator for the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools and the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies at Johns Hopkins University.

Stephanie Jones is a doctoral candidate in the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program at Syracuse University. She has a certificate of advanced study in Women and Gender Studies. She has served as the Assistant Director of TA Education for the Syracuse University Writing Program. Her latest publication, “#BlackStudy the Past to Find Hope in the Future,” is a reflection on the use of hashtags as intersectional praxis and is published with Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal. Her research interests include Afro-futurist feminisms, Black feminist rhetorical studies, and anti-racist and radical race literacies.

Jaymon Ortega is a second-year PhD student at USC Rossier’s School of Education in the Urban Education Policy Program. Jaymon’s research explores the ways in which video games and their social ecosystem function as a tool for racial equity for Black and Latinx students. Jaymon has worked at nine community colleges in the Los Angeles area as both a professor and counselor. Before working in the California community college system, he advised student-athletes, first-generation, and low-income students at USC and the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Kishonna L. Gray (@kishonnagray) is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She previously served as a MLK Scholar and visiting professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Gray is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar and digital herstorian whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, video games, and Black cyberfeminism. Dr. Gray is the author of Intersectional Tech: The Transmediated Praxis of Black Users in Digital Gaming (LSU Press, 2020). Intersectional tech can be understood as the visual, textual, and/or oral engagement of the Black body in transmediated spaces, focusing on the critical deconstruction of the exploited, hypervisible labor of any associated Black performances (online and IRL). Dr. Gray is also the author of Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014) which has been described by T. L. Taylor as “an insightful, original, and compelling piece of research,” and also described by Tressie McMillan Cottom as “an important contribution to the sociology of race in the digital era.”