MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies
Studying Media and Making Media
After thirty years in service, Minitel offers a wealth of data for thinking about internet policy and an alternative model for the internet's future: a public platform for private innovation.
Sociologist Nick Couldry radically rethinks the implications of social constructivism for a work saturated not just with digital media, but with data processes
Sean Cubitt asserts the value of anecdotal evidence against the rise of statistics, but at the same time wants to confront the difficulties in bringing about an encounter between readers (human or otherwise) and the mass image constructed by social media and search giants.
Explore how certain places come to be seen as “at risk” in anticipation of climate change, and what this way of seeing means for their inhabitants. Drawing on fieldwork over four years in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the talk will focus on the fraught development and implementation of new FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) flood maps for New York City, where hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars in property now lie in the high-risk flood zone.
Jennifer Holt examines the legal and cultural crises surrounding the regulation of data in “the cloud.” The complex landscape of laws and policies governing digital data are currently rife with unresolvable conflicts. The challenges of distributing and protecting digital data in a policy landscape that is simultaneously local, national, and global have created problems that often defy legal paradigms, national boundaries, and traditional geographies of control.
Join us for this year's alumni panel, when we hear from four alums of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies as they discuss their experience at MIT and what their careers have looked like in the fields a CMS degree prepared them for.
Anjali Vats: "The everdayness and banality of piratical trauma fuels desires for intellectual property maximalism and intellectual property criminalization, which reproduce the very conditions which gave rise to the trauma."
Eric Klopfer asks, what theories and evidence can we generate and build upon to provide a foundation for using augmented and virtual reality technologies productively for learning?
Carleen Maitland introduces the terms "digital refugee" and "digital humanitarian brokerage" as she previews her new edited volume Digital Lifeline? ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons.
University of North Carolina's Deen Freelon will explain how he and his collaborators are addressing challenges to analyzing Russian political influence operations and present key preliminary findings from their ongoing project focused on this campaign.
andré carrington's research on the cultural politics of race in science fiction radio drama aims to expand the repertoire of literary adaptation studies by reintegrating critical perspectives from marginal and popular sectors of the media landscape into the advancing agendas of Afrofuturism and decolonization.
Jenny Korn uses critical race theories and intersectional feminist theories to analyze the visual and textual content of the blog #IfTheyGunnedMeDown to reveal constructions of social justice, respectability politics, media biases, racial stereotypes, viral popularity, and hashtag activism on Tumblr.
CMS/W Professor Lisa Parks presents what keeps low-income Tanzanians from accessing broadband services despite four undersea cable landings and an innovative regulatory regime.
Nancy Baym: "By the time musicians and industry figures realized they could use the internet to reach audiences directly, those audiences had already established their presences and social norms online, putting them in unprecedented positions of power."
Emily Rueb, a reporter for The New York Times, will share insights gained in bursting boundaries of traditional storytelling for The New York Times's Metro desk -- weaving video, audio, illustrations and text across multiple platforms.
