About

Tom Boellstorff is a Series Editor for the Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology, alongside Bill Maurer. His work is situated within a growing community of social scientists, including anthropologists, who have extended classic ethnographic methods and questions into contemporary domains such as technology and economics. Boellstorff's research focuses on phenomena like infrastructures and communications technologies, both old and new, virtual sociality, reconfigured forms of finance and money, and the pervasive influence of online interaction on offline life. This research is ethnographically and historically informed and is characterized by strong interdisciplinary connections, often bridging anthropology with fields as diverse as design and engineering. The series he edits aims to present innovative interdisciplinary work that explores how new technologies combine with older technologies and cultural understandings to shape novel forms of subjectivity, embodiment, knowledge, place, and community. It highlights the continuity and change, promises and perils, of emerging modes of finance, value, and online sociality, showcasing the relevance of anthropology to significant social, economic, and technological phenomena, particularly in the realm of digital culture.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Anthropology
• Social Science
• Epistemology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Communication
• Human–computer interaction
• Knowledge management
• Philosophy
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• TV POWWW! and Televised Play in the Early Videogame Industry

  Television & New Media · 2026-01-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  TV POWWW! was a television program built around a technology which allowed viewers to control televised videogames over the telephone. This article chronicles its history while analyzing its technology, social contexts, aesthetics, and impact on game design and development. We situate TV POWWW! at the nexus of several developments during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These include new perceptions of mediated interaction facilitated by computerization and technical communication networks, experiments in participatory television, ideas about simplified videogame design for televised play contexts, and forms of gendered spectatorship and play.

  PublisherDOI

• The Work of Teaching the Canon: Reflections on Jim Ferguson’s Legacy at UC Irvine

  African Studies Review · 2026-03-26

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We write these reflections on

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Half Stress, Half Party: Play and Labor at Mattel in theEarly Videogame Industry

  2025-06-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Queer subjects of intimate exclusion

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  An object dialogueAt once expansive and generous, Queer objects to the rescue: Intimacy and citizenship in Kenya exemplifies the kind of scholarship that invites extension.My acceptance of this invitation involves two framing decisions.First, I focus on only three topics: emotion, time, and politics.Second, I place these primarily in conversation with my own work, weaving in a third interlocutor in the final section.While informed by dictates of scope and concision, these framing decisions represent a genre move.To wit: this is not a book review or even commentary, but what we might term a "scholarly dialogue."Such a genre is uncommon-perhaps its closest analogue is the transcribed interview, which de-emphasizes citation.I employ this genre to build on the insights of Queer objects to the rescue, suggesting further avenues of inquiry. Political heterosexismMeiu frames the project of Queer objects to the rescue as follows:In the past two decades, political homophobia, a tactic of power deployed by leaders, elites, and their supporters across the world, has "gone modular," Michael J. Bosia and Meredith L. Weiss (2013: 6) argue, "being imposed in a consistent way across diverse contexts."However, for political homophobia to do the work of power across these contexts, it must also resonate with local fears, anxieties, and aspirations.In other words, it has to (be made to) become meaningful.(p.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Climate of Comparison

  Suomen Antropologi Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society · 2025-12-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay is based on the 2025 Westermarck Lecture, delivered at the 50th anniversary meetings of the Finnish Anthropological Society. My deepest thanks to the organisers, staff, and participants of that conference, including Sarah Green, Soumhya Venkatesan, and Tuija Pulkkinen. The lecture provided an opportunity to reflect on the conference theme of ‘comparisons’ through my personal, intellectual, and activist biography. In discussions with Green, Pulkkinen, Venkatesan, and others, we decided I would strive to give this essay the tone of the original lecture. I have woven in scholarly citations, but the essay has short sections and no footnotes. I hope its conversational stance captures the generative and generous context of the conference. My thanks to Suvi Rautio for their helpful editorial suggestions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Videogames and Public Play in the Late 1970s: the Case ofTV POWWW!

  2024-09-30

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Intellivision

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2024-02-27 · 2 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari's main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision, Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivision's chips and code, games, marketing and business strategies, organizational and social history, and the cultural and economic context of the early US games industry from the mid-1970s to the great videogame industry crash of 1983. While many remember Atari, Intellivision has largely been forgotten. As such, Intellivision fills a crucial gap in videogame scholarship, telling the story of a console that sold millions and competed aggressively against Atari. Drawing on a wealth of data from both institutional and personal archives and over 150 interviews with programmers, engineers, executives, marketers, and designers, Boellstorff and Soderman examine the relationship between videogames and toys—an under-analyzed aspect of videogame history—and discuss the impact of home computing on the rise of videogames, the gendered implications of play and videogame design at Mattel, and the blurring of work and play in the early games industry.

  PublisherDOI

• Pronoun Trouble

  2024-04-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ethnography and Virtual Worlds

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2024-01-01

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Pronoun Trouble

  2024-04-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  English speakers face a dilemma: the current structure of their language is exclusionary with regard to gender. This chapter suggests that radical gender inclusion is best achieved not with personalized gender pronouns, but general (also termed epicene) “they.” By examining pronouns across place and time, the chapter shows how English already marks gender only on third-person singular pronouns, and replacing these with they is feasible and effective. While there are significant disadvantages to personalized gender pronouns, there are also perils to epicene “they,” and the chapter discusses how to address these disadvantages. Using a comparative analysis and employing a decolonial perspective that decenters English, the chapter seeks to contribute to a future of radical gender inclusion and to demonstrate the power of queer anthropology to contribute to crucial contemporary debates.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: The Role of People with Disability in the Innovation of Online Technology

  NSF · $279k · 2015–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Bonnie Nardi

  19 shared

• Celia Pearce

  13 shared

• Kathryn Robinson

  Australian National University

  9 shared

• Tony Taylor

  6 shared

• Celia Pearce

  6 shared

• Olivier Servais

  5 shared

• Bill Maurer

  University of California, Irvine

  5 shared

• T. L. Taylor

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Stanford

  2000