Tom Boellstorff is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego in 2004 and his B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1999
He is the author of "A Global History of Ethnicity" (Princeton, 2010), and "The Global Aesthetic: Mass Culture in the Late Twentieth Century" (Cambridge, 2006) and has published widely on modern and postmodern forms of visual culture and their interplay with transnational migration and diaspora.
Virtual worlds are places of imagination that encompass practices of play, performance, creativity and ritual.Tom Boellstorff
Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities. Virtual worlds make such shifts explicit, as well as introducing spaces for play and performance.Tom Boellstorff
