Alexander Cho

Alexander Cho is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a media scholar, digital design researcher, critical theorist, and pop culture geek. He teaches classes at UCSB on Asian Americans in media as well as on gender and sexuality. His research combines critical race theory, queer theory, design thinking, and ethnography to explore how marginalized populations use social media as a tool for self-expression and social change and explores how social media contain values and power structures built into their design. He was previously a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine.

He is co-editor of a tumblr book: Platform and Cultures (Michigan 2020), co-author of The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality (NYU 2018), and is currently completing a monograph examining the interdependence of queerness, race, and the design of social media. His lead-authored, peer-reviewed research has appeared in publications such as CHI: The Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems; New Media & Society; and Foundations of Digital Games. His research and expertise regarding social media has been quoted or referenced in popular press outlets as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, CBC Radio, Catapult, and Pitchfork.

In addition to his research and teaching, Professor Cho also regularly engages in community-oriented scholarship and policy/advocacy work, such as his lead-authored white paper for UNICEF on youth digital civic engagement practices as well as practitioner-oriented thought leadership around youth and digital media in venues such as the Parenting for a Digital Future initiative and the Connected Learning Alliance.

Prior to his academic research and teaching, Professor Cho was a journalist in the LGBTQIA+ media, most notably as the Editor of the Southern California newsmagazine Frontiers, where he secured the worldwide exclusive coming out interview with Star Trek’s Asian American icon, George Takei.