In Comparative Media Studies, we investigate and engage in the world’s complex media environment. We research multiple media forms and technologies, from books, pamphlets, and silent films to social media, virtual reality, and globally-networked games. We study the emerging media practices of states, corporations, social movements, fan communities, and everyday people. Embracing MIT’s motto of mens et manus, we design and create media through practice-based research labs. We examine media within the contexts of varied cultures, societies and social structures, and we critique and design media to empower communities. Above all, we are committed to an ethically and critically engaged approach to the study and production of media.
Research Themes
Our research groups, using a lab model, produce diverse projects. But collectively they work within themes of equity, critical design, and open collaboration.
Latest
Video: “What is a Media Psychography? A 20-year Methodological Journey”
The role of interdisciplinary research and how Charisse L’Pree has maneuvered a wide variety of methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, critical, and applied, in order to answer life’s questions.
Restoring the Fairness Doctrine can’t prevent another Rush Limbaugh
Professor Heather Hendershot writes in the Washington Post that “Limbaugh once boasted he had single-handedly ‘brought AM radio back from the dead.’ It was simultaneously one of the most accurate and least offensive comments he ever made.”
Ludics—Play as Humanistic Inquiry
In the introduction to the edited volume Ludics, Visiting Professor Eric Gordon and Vassiliki Rapti write that “this book takes the bold position that play is an antidote to dark times. Rather than an escape hatch, it provides opportunity for discovery, connection, joy, care, and relational aesthetics—conditions that are central to worldliness, not extraneous to it.”
