MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Featuring a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices. You can learn more about us, including info about our faculty and academic programs and how to join us in person for events, at cmsw.mit.edu.
Episodes
A Reading with Poet Laureate Arthur Sze
This reading, part of MIT’s William Corbett Poetry Series, welcomes former U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze back to the campus where he began his literary journey. Introduced by Chloe Garcia Roberts and Nick Montfort, the event reflects on poetry’s enduring place at MIT and its power to shape lives and communities across generations. Sze’s visit highlights the unexpected connections and “rhymes” that
"Pomegranate" reading and discussion, with the book's author Helen Elaine Lee
The acclaimed author of "The Serpent’s Gift", Helen Elaine Lee, returns with this poetic and powerful journey of healing and autonomy.
About the Book
As she wraps up her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center, Ranita Atwater is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children from the aunts who have been raising them. Leaving behind her lover Maxi
Bernard Geoghegan, “Learning to Code: From Information Theory to French Theory”
How and why, in the latter half of the twentieth century, did informatic theories of “code” developed around cybernetics and information theory take root in research settings as varied as Palo Alto family therapy, Parisian semiotics, and new-fangled cultural theories ascendant at US liberal arts colleges? Drawing on his recently published book “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory,” and
Francesca Bolla Tripodi, “The Propagandists’ Playbook”
The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so effective and pervasive, while also humanizing the people whose worldviews and media practices conservatism embodies. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the c
Lupe Fiasco presents “Rap Theory & Practice: an Introduction”
An exploration into the underlying fundamental functions, structures, and principles of rap. Open to the public, the talk was hosted at MIT on November 30, 2022.
Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and community advocate. Rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album Food & Liq
Resilient Witnessing In The Face Of Human Rights Abuses, Distrust, And Deepfakes
Sam Gregory is Director of Programs, Strategy & Innovation at WITNESS, which helps people use video and technology to protect human rights; studies relationship between emergent technologies, disinformation, media manipulation, & authoritarianism.
The Forensic Citizen Learning From The Past, Preparing For The Future
William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which brings together storytellers, technologists, and scholars to experiment with new documentary.
The Long & Ambiguous (pre)history Of Audiovisual In The Black Experience
Full title: “Between freedom & oppression: The long & ambiguous (pre)history of audiovisual in the Black experience”
Featuring Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Ekene Mekwunye, Jepchumba, and Russel Hlongwane.
Chakanetsa Mavhunga is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mavhunga explores international history, theory, and practice of science, technology,
The Whole World Is Watching How 1968 Helps Us Frame The Present
Professor Heather Hendershot's opening plenary from the "Bearing Witness, Seeking Justice" conference, with initial remarks by Dean Agustín Rayo and Tracie Jones, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She studies television news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. Her 2022 b
Moving Images In Absentia Courtroom Looking In The Age Of Hyper - Mediation
Kelli Moore is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who examines how media and technology produce legal and political knowledge to inform public debates on visual literacy, race, and other issues.
Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, “Seeing Silicon Valley”
Video also available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-seeing-silicon-valley-mary-beth-meehan-fred-turner.
Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley historian and media scholar Fred Turner discuss their recently published and award-winning book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America, a collaborative exploration of the culture of Silicon Valley — not the culture of Elon M
Charles North - The William Corbett Poetry Series 01
Charles North has published twelve books
of poems, three books of critical prose, and collaborations with artists and other poets. With James Schuyler, he edited the poet/painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway 2. His New and Selected Poems What It Is Like (2011) headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, and he has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two National Endowment for
Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech
In her 2021 book Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, our guest Martha Minow “outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses, such reforms are not mer
Oscar Winberg, "Archie Bunker Goes to Washington"
This talk reconsiders the role of television entertainment in American political life in the 1970s and beyond. Focusing on the situation comedy All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), the talk looks at a turn to politics in entertainment and a turn to entertainment in politics. In the 1970s, fictive characters, including Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) of A
Jens Pohlmann, "Platform Regulation and the Digital Public Sphere"
In this talk, Jens Pohlmann compares the discourse about the regulation of social media platforms and its effect on freedom of expression in Germany and the United States. Drawing on computational methods, he analyzes the discussion about a German anti-hate speech law called the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the debate about a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the U
“Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air”, Six Muslim Women in STEM
These six poets met as undergrads at MIT, brought together by the many things they shared: the challenges of being women in STEM, their lifelong pursuits of becoming better Muslims, and the exhaustion of drinking from the academic firehose. Through sharing their poetry, they want to foster empathy and mutual reciprocity for those who don’t often see someone like them within literary spaces. The po
Racquel Gates, “Reintroducing Melvin Van Peebles”
In this talk, Racquel Gates presents her experience working as consulting producer on the Criterion release of Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films.
A legendary filmmaker whose unique personality is just as well-known as his body of work, Van Peebles made an indelible impact on both Black film and independent cinema. How, then, to present new insights on Van Peebles in a way that built on viewers’
Katherine Jewell, "Party City: WMBR, Institutional Change, and Democratic Media"
College radio has long been known as the weird, wacky signals on the left of the FM dial offering music that would never be mainstream. But this wasn’t always the case—and moreover, even at stations exemplifying musical adventurousness and the community potential of college signals, institutional constraints loomed. In this talk, Katherine Jewell delves into the history of WMBR at MIT from the 196
David Thorburn: William Corbett Poetry Series
David Thorburn has been a teacher of literature for 57 years, 46 of them at MIT where he is Professor of Literature and Comparative Media and Director Emeritus of the MIT Communications Forum. Generations of MIT undergraduates have taken his lecture course, “The Film Experience,” which now reaches an international audience on YouTube. He was born in Manhattan and grew up in an old farmhouse in Ran
Jorge Caraballo, “How to Use Audio Storytelling to Cultivate a Community and Keep it Engaged”
Podcasts are in a golden age and are being used to effectively communicate new ideas, tell compelling stories, and build highly participative communities. This presentation will explore the power of audio storytelling to connect individuals in engaged networks of collaboration. Jorge Caraballo (’22 Harvard Nieman Fellow) will draw from experience as the former Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –Lat
Eric Freedman, "Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans"
Video game engines have promoted a new cultural economy for software production and have provided a common architecture for digital content creation across what were once distinct media verticals—film, television, video games and other immersive and interactive media forms that can leverage real-time 3D visualization. Game engines are the building blocks for efficient real-time visualization, and
Lynn Nottage’s "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark" and the Making of Black Women’s Film History
Lynn Nottage’s 2011 satirical play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood’s golden age. Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, was inspired in part by the career of African American actress, singer, and dancer Theresa Harris. A play about Black women’s cinematic repres
Uplifting Us: Design Opportunities in Centering Racialized Experiences in Games
Transcript and video available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-alexandra-to-design-opportunities-centering-racialized-experiences-game.
People of color have always been present in games as designers, developers, players, and critics. As Kishonna Gray further expounds, gaming is a site for “resistance, activism, and mobilization among marginalized users.” In this talk Alexandra To describes some of t
Craig Robertson, “The Filing Cabinet and the Gendering of Information Work”
In this talk, Craig Robertson provides a brief overview of the some of the themes of his recent book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minnesota, 2021). He argues the emergence of the filing cabinet illustrates an important moment in the genealogy of the ascendance of modern information. He highlights a moment when information became a label for an instrumental form of knowle
Graphic Materiality, Trauma, and Expressionist Comics: Artist’s Talk With Leela Corman
Graphic novel creator Leela Corman talk's and Q&A about her graphic novels and short comics on the topics of generational and personal trauma, New York City history, Polish-Jewish life, and amateur women’s wrestling.
Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic novel creator. Her books include Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012) and the short comics collection We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofi
Edward Schiappa, "The Transgender Exigency: The Role of Media Representation"
This presentation defines the phrase “transgender exigency” as a situation marked by an urgent need; in this case, the need to address the political and definitional challenges evinced by the need for transgender rights. The presentation provides evidence for substantial prejudice against transgender people, as well as the dramatic increase in transgender visibility and rights in the 2010s. The co
Memorial Colloquium for Professor Jing Wang
Video and transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-memorial-colloquium-in-honor-of-jing-wang
======
Professor Jing Wang — a beloved longtime colleague, vocal supporter of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and mentor to countless students and fellow faculty — passed away at age 71 this past July. At this Colloquium, we publicly honor her life and work, featuring brief talks by some of th
Nick Thurston, "Document Practices: The Art of Propagating Access"
This talk introduces arguments and examples from Nick Thurston’s current book project, Document Practices, which explores aesthetic and political frameworks for analyzing acts of re-publishing already public documents. With case studies that range from shadow libraries to experimental videos, and ideas about “the document” which haunt the sociology of literature as much as documentary arts practic
Educated Viewers: Civic Spectatorship, Media Literacy, and American Schools
In this talk, Victoria Cain provides a brief overview of some of the themes of her new book, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History, and a deeper dive into a few defining experiments with educational media in twentieth century US schools. Her talk will focus on the struggle of successive generations of education reformers who attempted to meet massive social and economic crises through careful in
Sulafa Zidani, “Messy on the Inside: Internet Memes as Mapping Tools of Everyday Life”
With the proliferation of social media, internet memes have become a ubiquitous part of everyday communication. However, the power of memes cannot be fully understood without considering their role in the complex relationship between technology, space, and politics. This talk will conceptualize memes as cultural mapping tools—tools that chart out the cultural hierarchies in relation to spatial and
Sandra Rodriguez, "Creating and Interacting with Virtual Entities"
Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-sandra-rodriguez-creating-interacting-virtual-entities-vr-ai-human-experiences/
Drawing from recent creative experiences Chomsky vs Chomsky (Sundance 2021) and Future Rites (Creative XR, UK-Can Immersive Exchange, Philharmonia, IDFA DocLab Forum), Director Sandra Rodriguez (Canada) explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and human creativity meet
Jonathan Sterne, "Diminished Vocalities: On Prostheses and Abilities"
Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-jonathan-sterne-diminished-vocalities-on-prostheses-and-abilities/
In this talk, Jonathan Sterne provides a brief overview of some of the themes of his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, December 2021) and a deeper dive into the approach to the voice he develops therein. Impairments are usually understood
Promotional Narratives, Science Fiction, and the Case for Mars Colonization
Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-james-wynn-promotional-narratives-mars-colonization.
Given the enormous impact that colonialism has had, and continues to have, in the United States, scholars frequently look to our colonial past to understand the American present. This focus on the past, though valuable, has discouraged attention to newly emerging colonial enterprises. Perhaps one
Measuring Equity-Promoting Behaviors in Digital Teaching Simulations: A Topic Modeling Approach
Digital simulations offer learning opportunities to engage and reflect on systemic issues of racism and structural violence against communities of color. This talk examines how natural language processing tools can be used to better understand participants’ experiences within simulated environments focused on anti-racist teaching and identify changes in participants’ behavior over time. As K-12 sc
Charisse L’Pree: "What is a Media Psychography? A 20-year Methodological Journey"
What is your relationship with media technologies? When we say things like “I love television,” “I hate the internet,” or “I can’t live without music, ” we implicitly answer this question without explicitly asking it. In her new book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love (Routledge 2021), Dr. Charisse L’Pree (MIT SB ’03 CMS, SB ’03 Course 9) addresses the strange love that we
Reworking the Archive: The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project
What are some unexplored ways that online environments can help us rethink “the archive”? How might i-doc storytelling tools expand what an archive can be as well as public engagement with history itself? This presentation explores these questions through a demonstration of the online Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project. The project is based on a collaboration with the Southeast Chi
#BlackInTheIvory: Academia’s Role in Institutional Racism
https://commforum.mit.edu/blackintheivory-academias-role-in-institutional-racism-96af14c37f5f
For many Black scientists and researchers, working in academia means weathering systemic bias, micro-aggressions, and isolation. Dr. Shardé M. Davis, a communications researcher at the University of Connecticut, created #BlackInTheIvory this past summer as a platform for discussing the experiences of Bla
BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail
In 2018, the United States enacted a “zero tolerance” policy which criminalized the act of seeking asylum. In June 2019, the inhumane conditions in detention camps across the border were revealed, and several weeks later the BORDERx project was established.
BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail is a comic anthology that examines the border crisis from a variety of points of view and narrative forma
Beyond the Living Dead: Treasures from the George A. Romero Archive
Warning: contains spoilers and strong language.
With his 1968 debut Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero helped to inaugurate a new era of both horror film and independent cinema, and introduced the world to the zombie as we know it today: re-animated corpses, stumbling towards the living in search of flesh, a ghoulish new kind of monster that has, in the subsequent half-century, become an
Patricia Saulis, “Two-Eyed Seeing in Environmental Justice and Media”
Two-eyed seeing has been a contemporary concept by two Indigenous Mikmaq Elders in Cape Breton Canada. Through the use of Indigenous Oral Tradition, Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Dr. Murdena Marshall have participated in many recordings of their concept and teachings. Their appearances at conferences across Canada and the United States provided many venues to share their work. In this presentati
Lana Swartz, "New Money: How Payment Became Social Media"
Lana Swartz, ’09, is joined by Aswin Punathambekar, ’03, to discuss Swartz’s new book New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale University Press). New Money frames money as a media technology, one in major transition, and interrogates the consequences of those changes.
Lana Swartz is an Assistant Professor in Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and a 2009 graduate of
Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media
Media Distortions is about the power behind producing deviant media categories. It shows the politics behind categories we take for granted such as spam and noise, and what it means to our broader understanding of, and engagement with media. The book synthesizes media theory, sound studies, STS, feminist technoscience, and software studies into a new composition to explore media power. Media Disto
Race and Representation of Syrian, Palestinian, and Norwegian Refugees in the News
This talk will discuss contemporary US feelings towards Syrian and Palestinian refugee resettlement and expectations for “appropriate” refugee attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Laura Partain’s findings come out of a generalizable experimental analysis conducted with native-born US citizens in December of 2019. Putting these views into an historical context, she explains that what might immediate
Eric Gordon, "Towards a Meaningfully Inefficient Smart City"
Mainstream “smart” city discourse offers a technocentric, efficiency-driven utopian fantasy that elides or exacerbates many urban problems of the past and present. Significant critical literature has emerged in recent years that highlights the importance of lived experience in smart cities, wherein values of equity, quality of life, and sustainability are prioritized. This literature has focused o
Jing Wang, "Walking Around Obstacles: Nonconfrontational Activists In Gray China"
Is there digital activism in China? What is it like to be an activist running a grassroots NGO in a land of censors? Is the state-public relationship in China antagonistic by default as our mainstream media would like us to believe? Are citizens of illiberal societies brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear? This talk challenges some of the binary assumpti
Justin Reich, "Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education"
In the 2000s and 2010s, education technology evangelists promised that new learning media would transform schooling and education. Then, a pandemic shut down schools all over the world, and online learning face a pivotal moment, and left a global public mostly disappointed. Instead of adaptive tutors, artificial intelligence, MOOCs or other new technologies, most learners got digital worksheets on
Kishonna Gray, "Exploring the Black Cultural Production of Gamers in Transmediated Culture"
With this presentation, Dr. Kishonna Gray illustrates a framework for studying the intersectional development of technological artifacts and systems and their impact on Black cultural production and social processes. Using gaming as the glue that binds this project, she puts forth intersectional tech as a framework to make sense of the visual, textual, and oral engagements of marginalized users, e
Shawna Kidman: "The Infrastructure of the U.S. Comic Book Industry"
This talk discusses the history of the American comic book industry during the 20th century. This medium has dominated the film and television landscape in recent years, and has come to define contemporary corporate transmedia production. But before moving to the center of mainstream popular culture, comic books spent half a century wielding their influence from the margins and in-between spaces o
Marina Bers, “Coding in Early Childhood: Storytelling or Puzzle Solving?”
Computer programming is an essential skill in the 21st century and new policies and frameworks are in place for preparing students for computer science. Today, the development of new interfaces and block-programming languages, facilitates the teaching of coding and computational thinking starting in kindergarten. However, as new programming languages that are developmentally appropriate emerge, it
Desmond Upton Patton: “Contextual Analysis of Social Media”
While natural language processing affords researchers an opportunity to automatically scan millions of social media posts, there is growing concern that automated computational tools lack the ability to understand context and nuance in human communication and language. Columbia University’s Desmond Upton Patton introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in
Creative Agency: Making, Learning, and Playing towards Understanding Computational Content
People often learn complex computational content most easily and deeply when they have “creative agency” – the social network, ability, skills, resources, and support to collaboratively and playfully make creative computational content in feedback-rich environments. This talk will present a lens on how we can create environments where learners are supported in developing creative agency, and how w
Can Journalists Save the Planet?
The Amazon is burning. Coral reefs are dying. Glaciers are melting, and as Earth gets pushed to its brink, journalists who can translate the impact of climate change and hold the powerful accountable are more needed than ever. Climate reporters Kendra Pierre-Louis (New York Times) and Lisa Song (ProPublica) head to the MIT Communications Forum to discuss the media’s role in illuminating environmen
Eric Klopfer: "Design Based Research on Participatory Simulations"
An important part of the work done at the The Education Arcade is based on a process of Design Based Research (DBR). In DBR, we design products that are meant to fill real classroom needs and then iteratively test and refine them. Eric Klopfer and The Education Arcade are currently working on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games.
During this talk, attende
Lucy Suchman: "Artificial Intelligence and Modern Warfare"
In June of 2018, following a campaign initiated by activist employees within the company, Google announced its intention not to renew a US Defense Department contract for Project Maven, an initiative to automate the identification of military targets based on drone video footage. Defendants of the program argued that that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of US drone operations, n
William Uricchio: "Why Co-Create? And Why Now? Reports from A Field Study"
Co-Creation is picking up steam as a claim, aspiration, and buzz-word du jour. But what is and why does it matter? Drawing on a just-released field study, Collective Wisdom, this session addresses those questions and explore the method’s implications for just and equitable creation. It considers co-creation in the arts with communities, across disciplines and organizations, and with non-humans (bo
If I Could Reach the Border…
Vivek Bald, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media, reads from a new essay that uses a teenage encounter with police and the justice system to explore questions of immigrant acceptability, racialization, and the South Asians American embrace of model minority status. He also provides an update on his documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem, recently funded by the PBS-affiliated Cen
Anushka Shah: "How Entertainment Can Help Fix the System"
Around the world, citizens are saying the system is broken. If it’s education and schools one day, it’s healthcare the next. Our trust in politics and public institutions is falling globally, and our confidence in the ability to solve problems around us is teetering.
Can entertainment and pop culture be a way out? Can films, television shows, and digital content become spaces to teach us how to f
Nick Montfort: "Poet/Programmers, Artist/Programmers, and Scholar/Programmers”
Computer programming is a general-purpose way of using computation. It can be instrumental (oriented toward a predefined end, as with the development of well-specified apps and Web services) or exploratory (used for artistic work and intellectual inquiry). Professor Nick Monfort’s emphasis in this talk, as in his own work, is on exploratory programming, that type of programming which can be used a
Christopher Weaver: “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”
While the appeal of games may be universal and satisfy our innate desire to play, the powerful dynamics that govern our behavior within games is even more interesting than the play itself. Can we broaden our understanding of play mechanisms by applying the subliminal mechanics of play beyond games? In this episode, Christopher Weaver, Founder of Bethesda Softworks and who teaches engineering and c
Plenary 2: Digital Technologies and Cultures
In 1998, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program held the first Media in Transition (MiT) conference and inaugurated a related book series. Research from that first MiT conference appeared in Democracy and New Media, Jenkins & Thorburn, eds., (MIT Press, 2003). Now, twenty years later, we are organizing the 10th iteration of the event. Much has changed over these two decades, but the theme “democr
Remarks By Conference Planning Committee Member Professor Lisa Parks
In 1998, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program held the first Media in Transition (MiT) conference and inaugurated a related book series. Research from that first MiT conference appeared in Democracy and New Media, Jenkins & Thorburn, eds., (MIT Press, 2003). Now, twenty years later, we are organizing the 10th iteration of the event. Much has changed over these two decades, but the theme “democr
Plenary 1: Culture Industries
Plenary 1: Culture Industries by Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Haidee Wasson, "Do-it Yourself Cinema: Portable Film Projectors as Media History"
Hosted with MIT Arts, Culture, and Technology and The Boston Cinema/Media Seminar.
Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, CMS/W
Haidee Wasson’s talk will explore the long and vibrant place of portable film devices in the history of small media, repositioning the ‘movie theatre’ as the singular or even central figuration of film presentation and viewing. From its earliest days, film was – in a se
Civic Arts Series: Lauren Boyle, “Thumbs Type and Swipe”
Introduction by Amy Rosenblum Martín, Independent Curator and Educator, Guggenheim
DIS (est. 2010) is a New York-based collective composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. Its cultural interventions are manifest across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects.
In 2018 the collective transitioned platf
The Battle of Algiers as Ghost Archive - Specters of a Muslim International
The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that poetically captures Algerian resistance to French colonial occupation, is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time, having influenced leftist and anti-colonial struggles from the Palestine Liberation Organization, to the Black Panther Party and the Irish Republican Army amongst others. But the film is more relevant and urgent than ever in the
An Evening with Comedienne Cameron Esposito
Comedienne Cameron Esposito delights audiences with a short comedy set followed by Q&A about Rape Jokes, her standup comedy special about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective.
Cameron Esposito is a nationally headlining comic who has garnered glowing praise from The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Variety, and The Guardian. She’s also a sexual assault survivor. In 2018, Esposito released Rap
Gaming the Iron Curtain: Computer Games in Communist Czechoslovakia as Entertainment and Activism
Based on the recent book Gaming the Iron Curtain, this lecture will outline the idiosyncratic and surprising ways in which computer hobbyists in Cold War era Czechoslovakia challenged the power of the oppressive political regime and harnessed early microcomputer technology for both entertainment and activism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovak authorities treated computer and information technol
Social Media Entertainment
In a little over a decade, competing social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, and their Chinese counterparts, have formed the base for the emergence of a new creative industry: social media entertainment. Social media entertainment creators have harnessed these platforms to generate significantly different content, separate from the century-long model
Dispatches from The Golden Age of Audio
Podcasting has given rise to new voices and new, highly personal ways to tell stories. But as the medium expands, it struggles to create gold standards for building shows that will be popular and financially sustainable. Cynthia Graber, co-host and co-creator of Gastropod, about the science and history of food, joins Al Letson, host of the investigative reporting show Reveal and creator of Errthan
“The Good Stuff”: The Intersections of Work, Leisure, and Relational Bonding on Tumblr and Patreon
Although the Pokémon GO phenomenon of 2016 has waned, the economies of internet fame and content production remains robust. Drawing from their dissertation, Nick-Brie will discuss the forms of relational work and bonding that occur on YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon, the latter two will be the focus of the talk. Drawing from two years of Internet ethnographic and participant obse
Caren Kaplan: "Bringing the War Home"
At the close of the First Gulf War, feminist architectural historian Beatriz Colomina wrote that “war today speaks about the difficulty of establishing the limits of domestic space.” That conflict of 1990-91 is most often cited as the first to pull the waging of war fully into the digital age and therefore into a blurring of boundaries of all kinds. Yet, most modern wars have introduced technologi
The Language of Civic Life: Past to Present
When everyday citizens interact about politics today, they often do so (1) anonymously and (2) in digital space, which results in a kind of aggressive chaos. But what happens when people identify themselves to one another in place-based communities as they do, for example, when writing letters to the editor of their local newspaper? How does that change public discussion?
This talk by Roderick Ha
Civic Arts Series: Myron Dewey, "Protecting the Water in Solidarity and Unity"
Myron Dewey is an indigenous journalist, educator, documentary filmmaker and the developer of Digital Smoke Signals, a social networking and filmmaking initiative, emerging out of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline project of 2016-17. Using a full range of contemporary media, including drone technologies, Dewey has pioneered the blending of citizen moni
The Consequences of America’s Miracle Machine
In the 20th century, America led the world in scientific and technological innovation, with federally funded basic research leading to breakthroughs ranging from the Internet to the Human Genome Project, with many positive impacts on society.
More recently, possibilities ranging from autonomous weapons to eugenic application of genetic editing tools have made it clear that the rate of discoveries
Brian Michael Bendis - The 2018 Julius Schwartz Lecture at MIT
[Video and photos available at https://cmswm.it/bendis-mit]
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing is thrilled to welcome award-winning comics creator Brian Michael Bendis, a New York Times bestseller and one of the most successful writers working in mainstream comics, for the 2018 Julius Schwartz lecture, in conversation with fellow comics writer Marjorie Liu.
For the last eighteen years, Brian’
2018 CMS Alumni Panel: Nick Seaver, Colleen Kaman, and Sean Flynn
On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, join us for our annual colloquium featuring alumni of CMS, discussing their lives from MIT to their careers today.
Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and a 2010 graduate of Comparative Media Studies, is an anthropologist of technology, whose research focuses on the circulation, reproduction, and inte
#MoreThanCode: Practitioner-led Research to Reimagine Technology for Social Justice
Our society is in the midst of an extremely urgent conversation about the benefits and harms of digital technology, across all spheres of life. Unfortunately, this conversation too often fails to include the voices of technology practitioners whose work is already focused on social justice, the common good, and/or the public interest. This talk by Sasha Costanza-Chock explores key findings and rec
Civic Arts Series: Marisa Morán Jahn
Marisa Morán Jahn is a multi-media artist, writer, educator and activist, whose colorful, often humorous uses of personae and media create imaginative pathways to civic awareness of urgent public issues. Working collaboratively, her projects include a classic American road trip, CareForce One, in a 50-year-old station wagon, advocating issues concerning care workers that became a PBS film series;
What’s So Funny About Oppressive Regimes?
== An MIT Communications Forum ==
As a senior producer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, Sara Taksler has spent her career taking comedic pot shots at politicians. When she met Dr. Bassem Youssef, an Egyptian satirist who uses comedy to criticize Middle Eastern politics, Taksler witnessed first-hand how laughter thrives, even in terrifying circumstances. Tickling Giants, Taksler
How To Fight A Nazi
An MIT Communications Forum
Christian Picciolini was 14 when he became a Neo-Nazi skinhead. He denounced eight years later and dedicated himself to helping others disengage from extremist groups. Picciolini has done peace advocacy work for more than a decade and in 2018, he founded the Free Radicals Project, a nonprofit dedicated to transitioning former extremists. He has conducted more than 200
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