About

Chelsea Kai Roesch (pronounced “resh”) is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she studies digital media, internet culture, and tech labor. She holds an M.A. in Film and Media Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara and a B.A. in Media and Cultural Studies from Hampshire College. She is a University of California Regents Fellow and has received awards from the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB, and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. 

Chelsea is the organizer of the Alt-Right Media Literacy Series—a speaker series aimed at understanding the new visual language of the Right online. 

Chelsea is currently conducting research conducting research on digital casino workers for her project, Casino Capitalism: Digital Gambling, Screen Workers, and Cyberlibertarians, to illustrate the global links between the digital gambling industry’s feminized labor force, neoliberal economic policies, and cyberlibertarian ideologies. She is advised by Drs. Patrice Petro, Alenda Chang, Laila Shereen Sakr, Maurizia Boscagli, and Jane Ward.

She has served as an Editorial Assistant for Camera Obscura, as Managing Director of the Technologies for Justice Lab at the Center for Feminist Futures at UCSB, and as a researcher for Global Health 50/50. Her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura and Socialist Worker. 

Prior to graduate school, Chelsea was a consultant for tech startups in San Francisco and Los Angeles on best practices for hiring software engineers.