Our faculty

Lindsay Rodgers, PhD, is the Co-Director and Knowledge Mobilization Officer of Concordia’s Applied AI Institute. She works closely with Communications professor, Fenwick McKelvey.

In 2024, Rodgers was awarded a $200,000 grant where she led a team of ten research assistants and community partners, including Women on Web, Women in AI, Queer Tech, and Digital Moment, in designing and developing practical tools and resources that Artificial Intelligence researchers, educators, employers, and practitioners could use to improve gender equity within STEM fields broadly and in AI sectors more specifically. 

Her doctoral dissertation, Not a Joke: Women’s work and feminist laughter in stand-up comedy, conducted an interdisciplinary analysis of the discoursive structures and affective politics of feminist stand-up comedy. Rodgers continues to work as a feminist comedy producer through the Hysterics Collective.

Christopher Dietzel, PhD, is an FRQSC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow in Communications Studies. He is interested in understanding the interactions between people and technology and how individuals promote their well-being and mitigate harms. 

He is the Co-Investigator of DIY: Digital Safety, a 5-year SSHRC Insight Grant that investigates technology-facilitated sexual violence among youth in Canada. He also works with the Sexual Health and Gender (SHaG) Lab at Dalhousie University to examine 2SLGBTQ+ health and digital platforms. 

Some of Dietzel’s current projects examine intersectional violence among LGBTQIA2S+ dating app users; dating apps’ safety mechanisms and governance policies; technology-facilitated sexual violence among young people; the mental health of LGBTQIA2S+ people who use digital platforms; the social health of LGBTQIA2S+ seniors who use technology; and queerphobic and transphobic online hate.

Since 2023, Dietzel has been a Research Associate in the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at York University. He was a Visiting Scholar in Sexuality Studies at York in 2022–2023, and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia in 2019–2020. Dietzel has taught at universities in Canada and France, and is an Adjunct Scholar in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie. 

Daniel Kreiss, PhD, is the Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina. He is also the co-founder and a Principal Researcher at the prestigious Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, one of the leading institutes studying politics, platforms, and publics globally.

Kreiss is an Associate Editor at top subfield journal, Political Communication, and the co-editor of the Journalism and Political Communication Unbound series with Oxford University Press.

Sandra Braman, PhD, is Professor of Media & Information, Michigan State University and Affiliate Prof. of Communication Studies, Concordia University in Montreal. Previous positions include endowed professorships at Rutgers, the University of Alabama, and Texas A&M and a research professor position at the University of Illinois-Urbana. She designed and launched the first MA program in telecommunications and information policy in Africa (the University of South Africa), and served as the Freedom of Expression Professor at the University of Bergen, Fulbright Specialist at Sodertorn U. (Stockholm), and Visiting Professor at the University of Rio de Janeiro.

She is Editor of the Information Policy Book Series at the MIT Press, Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA) and former head of the law sections of IAMCR and ICA. Her book Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (MIT Press, 2006), won the 2022 ICA Fellows Book Award for a Book of Enduring Value.

Kelly Boudreau, PhD has established herself as an international expert in game studies, game development, and interactive media and is currently an Associate Professor of Game Studies and Design at Harrisburg Institute of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania. She works closely with Communications Professor Mia Consalvo, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design and Director, Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre. They have collaborated for over twenty years in research and teaching activities.

She received her MA at Concordia in Sociology in 2007 and her PhD in Film Studies from the University of Montreal in 2012. Her dissertation, Between play and design: the emergence of hybrid-identity in single-player videogames bridges theoretical work from both film and game studies to explore the complex, multi-faceted role of the player in single-player videogames.

Professor Boudreau’s academic work has centered on the study of digital games. After her dissertation she published work exploring the role of deviance in gameplay, both in how game studios respond to the issue, and how deviant players can actually spur the formation of more tightly knit communities as a response against such incursions. More recently she has expanded into studying cozy games, exploring how game developers have both conceptualized the term and enacted it in actual game design.

Professor Boudreau worked for 3 years as an Assistant Professor at Brunel University in the United Kingdom and then went to Harrisburg Institute of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania, where she currently works as an Associate Professor of Game Studies and Design.