Michael Dalebout

Dr. Dalebout’s research examines contemporary forms of media participation in democratic cultures, and is especially concerned with self-presentational practices that have the potential to be culturally transformative for people whose experiences are marginalized from within representationalist treatments of identity.

Teaching. Dr. Dalebout teaches courses that examine how people enunciate, acknowledge, and negotiate difference and its challenges in everyday life. Courses draw on insights and examples from many disciplines in order to undestand how humanity’s ineluctable, agonistic relationship with technology undergirds the structures personal identity and collective action. Their classes ask students to think critically and creatively about human experiences, especially ones informed by intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ability, and class in today’s world.

Research. Dr. Dalebout’s current book project analyzes stand-up comedians’ digitally mediated acts of self-presentation, arguing that the political efficacy of comic voices in the age of the online digital public sphere is about ‘standing up.’ Their co-written article about how documedia, and alternate reality gaming as different approaches to the QAnon phenomenon appeared in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies in 2022. Their article on how children’s humor and media intervene in the intergenerational transmission of cultural anxieties, especially those that sustain social injustice, appear in Jeunesse: Young People, Cultures, and Texts in 2021.