Provostial Fellows Lightning Talks, in conversation with Bryan Brown – Stanford University
Event Details:
Austin Anderson (English)
Austin Anderson Ph.D is a Provostial Fellow at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Critical Game Studies Lab. He specializes in game studies and African American literature, with a particular focus on the burgeoning field critical race game studies. He is especially interested in how games are enmeshed with race, gender, identity, and class while also examining the liberatory potentials of gameworlds. His research and teaching interests also include African American literature, contemporary American fiction, media and comic studies, and Japanese popular culture ranging from manga to anime to video games.
His first book, Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies, uses the concepts of repetition and recursion to develop a formalist methodology for analyzing videogames as racial-cultural projects. It offers racial recursivity as a method to explore the underlying racial ideology within videogames, surfaces how these ideologies are manifested in game aesthetics, describes how these aesthetics connect to historical ideas of and around race, and argues that this process creates a self-referential feedback loop by its repetitious reoccurrence.
Chelsey Clark (Psychology)
Dr. Chelsey S. Clark is a Provostial Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Policy from Princeton University and her B.S. in Psychology from Yale University. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Nature Human Behaviour and Annual Review of Psychology. In addition to her academic work, she is the founder of The Terrace Café, a project that reflects her interest in entrepreneurship and community development.
Clark’s research examines how institutions—such as courts, corporations, and other social systems—shape public attitudes, social norms, and behavior. Using experimental methods, she studies how institutional decisions send signals that influence how people perceive what others believe, and how those perceptions drive individual and collective action. Her work spans topics including prejudice reduction, social norms, public opinion, and policy-relevant behavior change, with a focus on generating insights that advance both psychological theory and real-world impact.
Ángel Ross (Sociology)
Dr. Ángel Mendiola Ross is a Provostial Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. His research sits at the intersection of urban and suburban sociology, race and inequality, housing, and policing. Prior to his doctoral work, he was a senior research associate at PolicyLink and holds a Master of City Planning from UC Berkeley and bachelor’s degrees in sociology and economics from the University of Southern California.
Ross’s research examines how structural forces—particularly housing policy, policing practices, and carceral systems—shape racial and economic inequality across metropolitan regions. Using computational and quantitative methods, their work focuses on suburbanization, segregation, and displacement, with particular attention to how institutions such as prisons and eviction systems contribute to spatial inequality in the post–civil rights era. Their projects explore issues like gentrification, renter vulnerability, and the role of land use and law enforcement in reinforcing segregation, with the goal of informing more equitable policy solutions.
Sponsored by the Research Institute of CCSRE.
