This thesis delves into a critical study of the contemporary anatomy of power, in which mediation processes are becoming central to policing practices, with a focus on two contexts: the fight against crime in urban areas, and the battle against “rural violence” or “terrorism” in the Mapuche indigenous territories in the south of Chile.
Manufacturing Dissent: Assessing the Methods and Impact of RT (Russia Today)
This thesis seeks to unravel and assess RT’s historical roots, its creation and evolution, its methods, and ultimately its impact on American politics and society.
Play for Change: Educational Game Design for Grassroots Organizing
We need some of those interventions to come in the form of games, not necessarily because they are fun but because they contain crucial elements that are missing from the civic technologies that support engagement today.
Incomplete Sentences: Exploitation and Empowerment in American Incarceration Media
In order to interrogate the ways in which such popular media can lift up or drown out the voices of those who are incarcerated, I critically analyze three case studies: a popular television show, an acclaimed podcast, and a recently released feature film with an accompanying documentary.
In Medias Res 2018
Parks with a Genius Grant, an alum gives the MIT Ph.D. commencement address, and the relaunch of Media in Transition and the Media Spectacle.
Internet Killed the Michelin Star: The Motives of Narrative and Style in Food Text Creation on Social Media
While the underlying purpose of the construction and consumption of food texts remain the same from analog to digital form, the authority of food culture and its complimentary narrative control has shifted as a result of the convergence of food texts and digital media affordances.
Just Say No to “Just Say No”: Tensions in Organizational Approaches to Youth and Online Privacy in the Americas
This thesis examines organizational practices in the field of youth online privacy in the Americas. Mariel García-Montes describes harms created by protective, universalist, individualistic approaches that pose youth as conditional citizens, and makes a case for approaches based instead on youth agency, intersectional views of privacy, collective responsibility, and the recognition of youth as subjects of rights today.
