MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies
Studying Media and Making Media
The idiosyncratic and surprising ways computer hobbyists in Czechoslovakia challenged the power of the oppressive political regime and harnessed early microcomputer technology for both entertainment and activism.
Sohail Daulatzai on The Battle of Algiers' "competing narratives, a battleground over the meaning and memory of decolonization and Western power, and a site for challenging the current imperial consensus."
DIS enlists leading artists and thinkers to expand the reach of key conversations bubbling up through contemporary art, culture, philosophy, and technology, with the aim to inspire, inform and mobilize a generation around the urgent issues facing us today and tomorrow.
Haidee Wasson 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.
Princeton's Reena Goldthree examines how Caribbean newspapers—published in the islands and in the diaspora—facilitated the spread of annexation rumors and provided a crucial platform for West Indians to challenge U.S. imperial expansion.
Professor Christopher Weaver, Founder of Bethesda Softworks, will discuss how games work and why they are such potent tools in areas as disparate as military simulation, childhood education, and medicine.
Professor Ian Condry explores contemporary Japanese music, with a comparison of diverse examples, such as female Japanese rappers, underground techno festivals, the virtual idol Hatsune Miku, and the pop idol group AKB48.
Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations.
Helen Elaine Lee reads from the manuscript of her novel, Pomegranate, about a recovering addict who is getting out of prison and trying to stay clean, regain custody of her children, and choose life.
Anushka Shah asks, our trust in politics and public institutions is falling globally — can entertainment and pop culture be a way out?
Vivek Bald will read 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.
Professor William Uricchio on how co-creation is picking up steam as a claim, aspiration, and buzz-word du jour. But what is and why does it matter?
Lancaster University's Lucy Suchman's concern is with the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of (in)security, their deadly and injurious effects, and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations.
CMS/W Professor Eric Klopfer and The Education Arcade are currently working on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games.
Assistant Professor Paloma Duong on "how revisiting our assumptions about digital media and cultural agency, both in Cuba and in the broader hemispheric context, can speak to the dreams and demands of constituencies that operate between, beneath, and beyond the pressures of global markets and the nation-state."
