Founding Director, SIMLab
Dr. Florence M. Chee is Associate Professor of Digital Communication in the School of Communication and Director of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP) at Loyola University Chicago, USA. She is also Founding Director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab Chicago (SIMLab), devoted to the in-depth study of social phenomena at the intersection of society and technology. Her book, Digital Game Culture in Korea: The Social at Play (2023/2026 Bloomsbury, Lexington Books), critiques commonly held notions of online game addiction by taking an ethnographic look at the social and cultural roles that games fulfill in everyday life.
Dr. Chee has published award-winning and internationally recognized research in top-tier academic journals, including the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Popular Communication, Feminist Media Studies, and Games and Culture.
As a technocultural ethicist, Dr. Chee’s international experience and perspectives build upon decades of research examining the social, cultural, and ethical shifts in emergent digital lifestyles, working to translate insights about lived contexts across industrial, governmental, and academic sectors. Frequently sought out as a speaker, writer, and advisor, her sociotechnical interventions inform and influence the necessary decisions made in design, development, and policy arenas. She serves as an External Consultee to the Freedom Online Coalition’s (FOC) Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights (T-FAIR) and is a Key Constituent of the United Nations 3C Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence.
Dr. Chee has been awarded numerous prestigious international visiting fellowships, such as Visiting Faculty at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University NL continuing her research into how participation in online communities may present predatory and/or extractive relationships with their constituencies. Fellow of the Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA, and most recently a Fulbright Specialist Grant Award in 2025 to Switzerland at the ZHAW School of Management and Law, investigating social sustainability and resilience infrastructures of the U.S. and Swiss game industries.
Florence Chee has edited issues in the International Review of Information Ethics, Journal of Games Criticism, Human Technology, and currently serves as Associate Editor at flagship publication Communications of the ACM (CACM) https://cacm.acm.org/editorial-staff-board/
She has designed and taught graduate/undergraduate courses in Digital Media including Game Studies, where students engage with debates surrounding diversity, intersectionality and media production through social justice frameworks.
For inquiries by email, contact: fchee[at]luc[dot]edu.
Link to Publications via Google Scholar>>
News: https://theconversation.com/profiles/florence-m-chee-1311045/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcheeflo/
Follow her on Twitter @cheeflo
Specialties: Ethnography, Material Culture, Games Research, Mobility, Communities, Communcation Infrastructures, Cultures of Innovation and Policy, Research Ethics. Applied research methods (participant observation, interviews, focus groups, surveys).