MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba
2015-03-12 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco‘s Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba is a study of the role of corporeal expressivity in development of social criticism in Cuban art. Fusco explores the work of performance artists from the 1980s to the present and examines how the Cuban state has wielded influence over performance through a combination of politics and practices that enable cultural production on the one hand and discipline public behavior on the other.
The book will be published by Tate Publishing in the fall of 2015.
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and a MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT. She is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in numerous international biennials and festivals, as well as the Tate Liverpool, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) and The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003).

Cultural Studies and The Expediency of Culture, Rethought in Relation to Internet Platforms and Megadata
2015-04-02 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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George Yúdice, University of Miami
George Yúdice‘s The Expediency of Culture (2003) repositioned culture in connection with governmentality and biopower. The full force of social media, Internet platforms and megadata was not yet evident at the time. The argument that culture empties out as it becomes ever more pivotal in the creative economy has, Yúdice thinks, been borne out. Culture understood as the “terrain of struggle for interpretive power” needs to take into consideration its relocation and reconfiguration in new media and technologies. In that relocation key concepts of Cultural Studies need to be updated. This talk seeks to maps the requisite changes.
George Yúdice is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami.
This event is co-sponsored with MIT Global Studies and Languages.

Re-calling the Modem World: The Dial-up History of Social Media
2015-04-09 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Kevin Driscoll, CMS ’09, and Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research
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For fifteen years before the graphical Web, thousands of personal computer owners encountered the pleasures, promises, and challenges of online community through networks of dial-up bulletin-board systems (BBS). While prevailing histories of the early internet tend to focus on state-sponsored experiments such as ARPANET, the history of bulletin-board systems reveals the popular origins of computer-mediated social life. From chatting and flirting to shopping and multiplayer games, it was on these locally-run systems that early modem users grappled with questions of trust, identity, anonymity, and sexuality. In this talk, Kevin Driscoll will map out the generative conditions that gave rise to amateur computer networking at the end of the 1970s and trace the diffusion of BBSing across diverse cultural and geographic terrain during the 1980s. This history provides lived examples of systems operated under vastly different social, technical, and political-economic conditions than the centralized platforms we inhabit today. Indeed, remembering the grassroots past of today’s internet creates new opportunities to imagine a more just, democratic tomorrow.
Kevin Driscoll (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. His research concerns the popular and political cultures of networked personal computing with special attention to myths about internet history. Previously, he earned an M.S. in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught mathematics and computer science at Prospect Hill Academy.

The Dancing Body of the State: Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture
2015-04-23 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
(Co-sponsored with both MIT Global Studies and Languages and Women’s and Gender Studies. And join our mailing list for an event reminder email.)
Thomas DeFrantz, Duke University
21st century popular culture, circulated by media, enables unusual affiliations of bodies in motion. When black social dances are practiced by American political leaders, as when First Lady Michelle Obama demonstrates “the Dougie” in her “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign, or when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton dances alongside others during her 2012 tour of Africa, black social dance moves toward a center of considerations of embodied knowledge. This talk wonders at the intertwining of African American social dances and political leadership, conceived as the bodies of elected officials. In addition we will consider the commercial and socially-inscribed leaders of popular cultural, including Beyonce and Brittany Spears, as arbiters of African American social dance. Ultimately, the talk suggests a haunting presence of queers-of-color aesthetic imperatives within political mobilizations of black social dance, continually – and ironically – conceived as part and parcel of rhetorics of liberation and freedom of movement. As queer dances emerge in marginalized relationship to mainstream concerns of identity and gesture, and then migrate toward shifting centers of popular culture, they shimmer and switch, bringing to light – perhaps – possibilities of creative aesthetic social dissent.
Thomas F. DeFrantz is Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. His books include the edited volume Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (de la Torre Bueno Prize, Oxford University Press, 2004), and Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (Duke University Press, 2014). In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin and an outstanding group of artists and researchers, he founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. A director and writer, he is the outgoing President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. He taught at MIT for many years, in Music and Theater Arts and Comparative Media Studies.

Ryan Cordell: "Melville in the First Age of Viral Media"
2015-04-30 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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This event kicks off MELCamp5, a meeting of researchers from the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) April 30-May 2 to discuss an NEH-funded digital archive of Herman Melville’s work. Do come to a free public event on Friday May 1 in 2-105 on “The Critical Archive and the Future of MEL.” Moderator: Kurt Fendt (MIT), and Panelists Peter S. Donaldson (MIT), Julia Flanders (Northeastern University), John Unsworth (Brandeis University). All welcome.

Ryan Cordell, Assistant Professor of English and Core Founding Faculty Member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University
Ryan Cordell, co-director of the Viral Texts project, will speak about his work uncovering pieces that “went viral” in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines.
The Viral Texts project seeks to develop theoretical models that will help scholars better understand what qualities—both textual and thematic—helped particular news stories, short fiction, and poetry “go viral” in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. What texts were reprinted and why? How did ideas—literary, political, scientific, economic, religious—circulate in the public sphere and achieve critical force among audiences? How might computational methods reveal Melville’s popular reception and reputation or expose the shaping influence of the popular press on his writing? And how can these popular (perhaps even ephemeral) texts thicken our understanding of literary authors like Herman Melville?
Cordell is Assistant Professor of English and Core Founding Faculty Member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. His scholarship focuses on convergences among literary, periodical, and religious culture in antebellum American mass media. Prof. Cordell collaborates with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on the NEH-funded Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover reprinted content across large-scale archives of antebellum texts. These “viral texts” help us to trace lines of influence among antebellum writers and editors, and to construct a model of viral textuality in the period. Cordell is currently a Mellon Fellow of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also serves as vice president of the Digital Americanists scholarly society; is Co-Editor-in-Chief of centerNet’s forthcoming new journal, DHCommons; and writes about technology in higher education for the group blog ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Danielle Keats Citron: "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace"
2015-05-07 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Danielle Keats Citron
Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible to stop, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace reveals the serious emotional, professional, and financial harms incurred by victims.
Persistent online attacks disproportionately target women and frequently include detailed fantasies of rape as well as reputation-ruining lies and sexually explicit photographs. And if dealing with a single attacker’s “revenge porn” were not enough, harassing posts that make their way onto social media sites often feed on one another, turning lone instigators into cyber-mobs.
Hate Crimes in Cyberspace rejects the view of the Internet as an anarchic Wild West, where those who venture online must be thick-skinned enough to endure all manner of verbal assault in the name of free speech protection, no matter how distasteful or abusive. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law, Danielle Keats Citron contends, and legal precedents as well as social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it.
Citron is Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

On the Politics of Punk Media and Peru
2015-09-17 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
L. Shane GreeneIndiana University
This talk, with L. Shane Greene, presents a theoretical overview of various situations – particularly their political, aesthetic, and media dimensions – that arose in the production of a book about the history of anarchism and punk rock during Peru’s war with the Maoist-inspired armed group known as the Shining Path. Specifically, Greene is interested in how recounting the role of “underground rock” musicians and artists during the war – and from within the aesthetics of punk media – complicates the dominant narratives that describe Peru’s period of political violence and those that drive the story of globalization. The talk will draw from both primary examples from the historical period in question and contemporary ones that emerged from the book project.
Greene is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, where he also serves as director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
This event is co-hosted with MIT Global Studies and Languages.

Hierarchy and Democracy in Modern Japan’s Mass Media Revolution
2015-10-01 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hiromu Nagahara, Associate Professor of History and Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor
Modern Japan experienced what could be described as its first wave of “mass media revolution” in the period stretching from the mid-1920s into the 1930s, when new forms of media industry as well as technology vastly expanded the number of potential consumers of media products. This talk, with Hiromu Nagahara, explores the political implications of this development, especially as it relates to how the rise of mass media reshaped existing social and cultural hierarchies in Japan (and how, in some cases, it didn’t). Based on his current book project, Japan’s Pop Era: Music in the Making of Middle-Class Society, this talk will focus on the life and career of Horiuchi Keizō (M.S. 1923), an MIT grad who found himself in the center of all of this as a prominent composer, critic, radio broadcaster, and publisher.

The Adventures of Ms. Meta: Celebrating the Female Superhero Through Digital Gaming
2015-10-15 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sarah Zaidan
The importance of female superheroes in Western culture cannot be ignored. From Wonder Woman in the 1940s to Captain Marvel in the 2010s, the inspiration and cultural impact these representations of heroism provide fans regardless of gender are undeniable. While there is a wealth of research examining the representation of the female superhero and how this speaks to perceptions of femininity across the past eighty years, its focus is often the prevalence of stereotypical over authentic depictions, and the harmful effects of this on society.
Sarah Zaidan‘s research combines the platforms of video games with the artistic styles and narrative themes of comics and historical fact, culminating in an original game that celebrates the power of the female superhero, and her cultural importance. The game tells the story of Ms. Meta, a contemporary superhero created by the player. As she journeys through time to stop her nemesis’ plans, she will encounter characters drawn from the stories of women and fans from each era, opportunities to challenge preconceived notions of female superheroes, and the ability to change the course of history. The gameplay will be grounded in problem-solving and collaboration, and will incorporate player choices to create ownership and personal relevance.
Dr. Sarah Zaidan is a game designer, artist and researcher whose work explores how video games and comic books can engage in a dialogue with identity, gender and civic awareness. She is Kingston University London’s first recipient of a Ph.D. by practice in superhero art and history with research findings presented in the form of an award winning video game, The Adventures of MetaMan: The Male Superhero as a Representation of Modern Western Masculinity (1940-2010). She is one of the creators and illustrators of the feminist superhero comic series My So-Called Secret Identity, in collaboration with Batman scholar Dr. Will Brooker and animation artist Susan Shore. Dr. Zaidan teaches video game design at Emerson College and is a research fellow with the Engagement Lab. Her work is characterized by rapid prototyping, iterative design processes and by discovering game systems in everyday life.

From Firing Line to The O’Reilly Factor
2015-10-22 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Heather Hendershot
William F. Buckley’s public affairs program Firing Line (PBS, 1966–1999) offered a space for no-holds-barred, honest intellectual combat at its finest. The conservative Buckley hoped to convert viewers, but there was more to it than that. You could actually learn about other points of view, and thereby become a better liberal or a better conservative from watching the show. There is simply no equivalent on TV today. Conservatives have Fox News, liberals have MSNBC, and in more neutral territory we find C-SPAN. Overall, politically oriented broadcasting has become a vast echo chamber (especially on talk radio), with many tuning in largely to have their views confirmed—and to hear the other side vilified. What happened? How did we get from Firing Line to The O’Reilly Factor? And how can we possibly fix things? Hendershot’s talk will provide the historical, regulatory, and political context we need in order to begin to address these very difficult questions.
Heather Hendershot is a professor of film and media in CMS/W. Her book on Firing Line is forthcoming in the summer of 2016.

Global Internet Development Viewed Through the Net Vitality Lens
2015-10-29 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Stuart N. Brotman
Net Vitality is a new analytic approach to examine ways to sustain long-term Internet vibrancy, both in the United States and around the world, and helps inform future government policies that impact the deployment and adoption of broadband technologies. Unlike other comparative studies that rank countries quantitatively based on a simplistic assessment of broadband speeds, Stuart N. Brotman’s Net Vitality Index, released earlier this year, also measures countries qualitatively to determine how well they are performing in a global competitive environment, gauging the true vitality of a country’s Internet ecosystem.
Based on five years of research, the Net Vitality Index is the first holistic analysis of the global broadband Internet ecosystem, identifying the United States, South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France as the top-tier leaders. Unlike the one-dimensional rankings that serve as the basis of most broadband comparative studies, Brotman’s composite metric takes into account 52 factors developed independently to evaluate countries on an apples-to-apples basis. Overarching categories assessed encompass applications, devices, networks, and macroeconomic factors.
Brotman is a faculty member at Harvard Law School and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

CMS Alumni Panel
2015-11-19 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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.
Margaret Weigel, ’02
Dan Roy, ’07
Ilya Vedrashko, ’06

Erik Stayton, ’15
Chelsea Barabas, ’15
Here’s who we’ve lined up so far (subject to change as ever):

Margaret Weigel, ’02, who works in digital education: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretweigel/
Dan Roy, ’07, widely known for his games for learning projects: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=2512953
Ilya Vedrashko, ’06, who does big data-driven consumer research: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3838774
Erik Stayton, ’15, now a Ph.D. student at MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society: http://web.mit.edu/hasts/graduate/stayton.html
Chelsea Barabas, ’15, the newly minted advisor to the Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=75805502

The Bengali Harlem/Lost Histories Project: Documenting South Asian America's Interracial Past
2015-12-03 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vivek Bald, Associate Professor
Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, will discuss his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit.
The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), a linear documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem (currently in production), and a community-sourced, web-based documentary and oral history project, “The Lost Histories Project” (in development). Bald’s talk and demo will present a new iteration of the online project and newly edited material from the documentary.

Lisa Parks: "Drone Matters: Vertical Mediation in the Horn of Africa"
2016-02-11 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa ParksUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
Since 2002, the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and CIA have orchestrated a covert drone war from Camp Lemonier in the African country of Djibouti, monitoring and striking alleged al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab suspects in Yemen and Somalia. As a media scholar, UC Santa Barbara’s Lisa Parks is interested both in the discourses that have been used to expose covert US drone interventions and in the ways that drone operations themselves function as technologies of mediation. Drawing upon media such as training manual diagrams, infrared images, Google Earth interfaces, and drone crash scene photos, this talk explores the drone’s mediating work through three registers: the infrastructural, the perceptual, and the forensic. Focusing on maneuvers between the ground and sky, Parks suggest that military drone operations are irreducible to the screen’s display and should be understood as practices of vertical mediation–as practices of communication and materialization that occur dynamically through the vertical field, and, as such, have particular kinds of affects. The talk based on a chapter of her forthcoming book, Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror.
Lisa Parks is Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005) and Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, forthcoming), and is co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003), and another in progress entitled Life in the Age of Drones (under contract, Duke UP). Parks has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a principal investigator on research grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department.

Caroline Jack: "How Facts Survive in Public Service Media"
2016-02-18 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caroline Jack, CMS/W Exchange Scholar and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University
Economic literacy has long been touted as a potential solution to national economic crisis and individual financial precarity. But what does it mean to be economically literate? In a field full of contestation, how do some perspectives get disqualified or excluded, and others held up as facts? Between 1976 and 1978, the nonprofit, quasi-governmental public service advertising organization The Advertising Council saturated the American media environment with messages about American citizens’ responsibility to become economically knowledgeable, and distributed over ten million copies of a glossy brochure designed to teach citizens the least they needed to know about the American economic system. Activist groups criticized the Ad Council campaign as propagandistic–but when these groups responded with their own information campaigns, they found themselves excluded from access to public funds and airwaves. Where was the line between objective information and propaganda? Who had the power to decide? How has this dynamic changed over time, as new media technologies have emerged and neoliberal policies and philosophies have moved from the margins to the center of American political culture? In this talk, Jack calls attention to corporate managers and executives as consequential social and ontological actors with distinctive vernacular theories of media and politics.
Caroline Jack is an Exchange Scholar in CMS/W and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her article “Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series” was recently published in Enterprise and Society.

Vincent Brown: "Designing Histories of Slavery for the Database Age"
2016-02-25 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vincent BrownCharles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University
Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to see its traces, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities.
Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice.

A Conversation with Guy Maddin
2016-03-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Installation artist, filmmaker, and director Guy Maddin
Guy Maddin and his partners are communing with the spirits of long-lost movies. In a conversation with William Uricchio, Maddin will discuss why we should bother digging up filmic and narrative memories from oblivion, how we can take advantage of the Internet to involve new publics, and how the act of doing so might help to create a new web-based art form.
Maddin is an installation artist, writer and filmmaker, the director of eleven feature-length movies, including The Forbidden Room (2015) and My Winnipeg (2007).
In the winter of 2015/16 he and Evan Johnson will launch their major internet interactive work, Seances, which will enable anyone online to “hold séances with” movies fashioned out of fragments of long-lost films.

Ariane Labed From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Maria de Medeiros From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Clara Furey From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Thomas Elsaesser: "Media Archaeology as Symptom"
2016-03-17 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Thomas ElsaesserColumbia University
For nearly one hundred years, the moving image has been discussed primarily from the perspective of photography: organizing our questions and theories around cinema as an ocular dispositif, based on light, projection and transparency, or as a recording dispositif, based on index, imprint and trace. In the age of digital imaging technologies, some of which have little to do with optics, such a history of the moving image seems too narrowly conceived. The broadly based, if loosely defined research field calling itself “media archaeology” not only locates the cinema within more comprehensive media histories, it also investigates apparently obsolete, overlooked, or poorly understood past media practices. The expectation is that by once more “opening up” these pasts, one can enable or envisage a different future. The question then arises: is media archaeology a (viable) disciplinary subject or a (valuable) symptom also of changes in our ideas of history, causality and contingency?
Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus at the University of Amsterdam and since 2013 has been teaching at Columbia University. Among his most recent books are: The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2012) and Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2nd edition 2015, with Malte Hagener). Forthcoming is Film History as Media Archaeology – Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2016).

Lisa Glebatis Perks: "Media Marathoning and Affective Involvement"
2016-03-31 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa Perks, Merrimack College
Although the popular press primarily uses the negatively connoted phrase “binge-watching,” Lisa Glebatis Perks employs the label “media marathoning” to describe viewers’ rapid engagement with a story world. Rather than positioning these media experiences as mindless indulgences, the phrase media marathoning intimates engrossment, effort, and purpose. These media engagement efforts can be rewarded with pleasurable experiences, but they can also lead to feelings of disappointment. Perks draws from discourse gathered from over 100 marathoners to describe some of marathoners’ most common emotional experiences, including anger, empathy, parasocial mourning, nostalgia, and regret. The theme of the talk is that characters become the marathoners’ pseudo-avatars, gaining shape, texture, and life through viewers’ affective investments.
Lisa Glebatis Perks (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Merrimack College. She recently published Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality, which explores the ways readers and viewers become absorbed in a fictive text and dedicate many hours to exploring its narrative contours.

Michael Taussig: "Mooning Texas"
2016-04-07 16:30 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
“Mooning Texas” – an adventure story involving social energy + art + Emile Durkheim’s “take” on Mauss + Hubert’s “take” on mana + the creativity of gossip.
Michael Taussig, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, was dubbed by the New York Times as “Anthropology’s Alternative Radical.” Taussig has been doing fieldwork since 1969. He has written on the commercialization of peasant agriculture; slavery; hunger; the working of commodity fetishism; colonialism on “shamanism” and folk healing; the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual; the making, talking, and writing of terror; and mimesis. He has also written “a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia.”
Introduced by Prof. Ian Condry, Global Studies and Languages, MIT.
Presented by the Dissolve Inequality series and the Latin American Studies Forum of MIT Global Studies and Languages.
gsl-events@mit.edu • mitgsl.mit.edu

Nick Seaver: "What Do People Do All Day?"
2016-04-14 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick Seaver, CMS ’10, and Assistant Professor at Tufts University
The algorithmic infrastructures of the internet are made by a weird cast of characters: rock stars, gurus, ninjas, wizards, alchemists, park rangers, gardeners, plumbers, and janitors can all be found sitting at computers in otherwise unremarkable offices, typing. These job titles, sometimes official, sometimes informal, are a striking feature of internet industries. They mark jobs as novel or hip, contrasting starkly with the sedentary screenwork of programming. But is that all they do? In this talk, drawing on several years of fieldwork with the developers of algorithmic music recommenders, Seaver describes how these terms help people make sense of new kinds of jobs and their positions within new infrastructures. They draw analogies that fit into existing prestige hierarchies (rockstars and janitors) or relationships to craft and technique (gardeners and alchemists). They aspire to particular imaginations of mastery (gurus and ninjas). Critics of big data have drawn attention to the importance of metaphors in framing public and commercial understandings of data, its biases and origins. The metaphorical borrowings of role terms serve a similar function, highlighting some features at the expense of others and shaping emerging professions in their image. If we want to make sense of new algorithmic industries, we’ll need to understand how they make sense of themselves.
Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. His current research examines the cultural life of algorithms for understanding and recommending music. He received a masters from CMS in 2010 for research on the history of the player piano.

CMS/W Town Hall
2016-04-21 17:00 | MA
Closed to the public.

Fox Harrell: "Reflections on Advanced Identity Representation"
2016-04-28 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Fox HarrellPhoto by Bryce Vickmark
Nearly everyone these days imaginatively uses virtual identities such as social media profiles, e-commerce accounts, and/or videogame characters. Yet, virtual identities can reproduce discrimination and stereotypes with devastating impacts on users ranging from worse performance and engagement for students to bullying and threats of violence. If such forms of oppression persist, e.g., female virtual identity users being threatened online, surely we must go advance our understanding of the roles these technologies play in society and how to design them to better suit diverse social needs. In this talk, Harrell presents some of the outcomes from his 5-year National Science Foundation-supported research initiative called the Advanced Identity Representation project. Namely, applying approaches from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and sociology to technologies such as videogames and social media, his research both reveals social biases in existing systems and implements systems to respond to those biases with greater nuance and expressive power.
D. Fox Harrell is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab). He was a 2014-15 recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication and fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Virtual Reality Meets Documentary: A Deeper Look
2016-05-05 17:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
(Note updated location: Stata Center, Room 123)
“In this case [of virtual reality], we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.” – Werner Herzog
When Time Magazine graced its cover with Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey’s awkward pose, it effectively proclaimed that VR was “the next big thing” that didn’t have any place in our lives yet. Google, Facebook, The New York Times, PBS Frontline, Sundance Film Institute and many others are investing heavily in virtual reality as a powerful new storytelling medium. It’s capturing the imagination of documentary storytellers all over the world yet for all its enthusiasts, virtual reality has its skeptics. For all virtual reality is talked about, it can be deeply misunderstood.
Virtual reality means many things to many people: an immersive experience, a new tool for storytelling, a cluster of quite different technologies and techniques, and even an epistemological claim. Little wonder that we lack consensus about “how to fill it with content.”
The goal of this panel is to talk with some of the leading creators in the VR space and better understand VR’s potentials and implications for documentary and journalism. This will help us to disambiguate some of the major strands of VR and in so doing consider the inherent tensions in VR between documentation and simulation, the challenges of spatial storytelling and new narrative structures, the ethics and cognitive neuroscience of immersion, interaction, and affect; and VR’s past and future.
Speakers
Raney Aronson-Rath runs FRONTLINE, PBS’s flagship investigative journalism series, and is a leading voice on the future of journalism. She has been internationally recognized for her work to expand FRONTLINE’s reporting capacity and reimagine the documentary form across multiple platforms. From the emergence of ISIS in Syria to the hidden history of the NFL and concussions to the secret reality of rape on the job for immigrant women, Aronson-Rath oversees FRONTLINE’s acclaimed reporting and directs the series’ evolution and editorial vision. She has developed and managed nearly 30 in-depth, cross-platform journalism partnerships with outlets including ProPublica, The New York Times, and Univision. Under her leadership, FRONTLINE has won every major award in broadcast journalism and dramatically expanded its digital footprint. Prior to FRONTLINE, Aronson-Rath worked at ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and her master’s from Columbia Journalism School.
Katy Morrison is co-Founder and producer at Virtual Reality studio VRTOV and makes virtual reality and immersive story experiences for non-fiction stories. Shaped by her experience working as a documentary maker, Katy’s interest is in subjectivity, identity and spatiality in an increasingly virtual and interconnected world. Previously Katy worked in documentary television as a researcher, writer and producer and has made over fifty hours of internationally broadcast documentary television as well as augmented reality apps, virtual reality experiences and immersive story installations. In addition to producing Virtual Reality, VRTOV regularly run workshops, speak at festivals and facilitate hands-on engagement with VR production techniques for broadcasters and media companies.
Nonny de la Peña was selected by Wired Magazine as a #MakeTechHuman Agent of Change and has been called “The Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Engadget and The Guardian. Additionally, Fast Company named her “One of the People Who Made the World More Creative.” for her pioneering work in immersive storytelling. As CEO of Emblematic Group, she uses cutting edge technologies to tell important stories—both fictional and news-based—that create intense, empathic engagement on the part of viewers. A Yale Poynter Media Fellow and a former correspondent for Newsweek, de la Peña has more than 20 years of award-winning experience in print, film and TV. De la Peña is widely credited with helping create the genre of immersive journalism and her virtual reality work has been featured by the BBC, Mashable, Vice, Wired and many others. Showcases around the globe include the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, The World Economic Forum in Davos, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Games For Change.
Caspar Sonnen is a festival organiser and curator specialised in independent cinema and digital media art. As New Media Coordinator of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, he has successfully developed digital festival strategies and online initiatives. In 2008, Sonnen launched IDFA DocLab, a pioneering platform for digital documentary storytelling and media art. IDFA DocLab is also one of the organising partners of PhotoStories. Besides his work at IDFA, Sonnen is co-founder and programmer of the Open Air Film Festival Amsterdam.

“Innovation” and “Engagement”: Experiments with What Industry Buzzwords Can Mean in Practice
2016-09-08 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
CMS/W alum Sam Ford (S.M., CMS, ’07) has spent most of the last decade exploring points of connection and contention between the media and marketing industries and media studies. Starting last year, that work has taken him to Univision’s Fusion Media Group (a portfolio of media companies which includes Fusion, Univision Digital, Univision Music, The Root, Flama, The Onion, A.V. Club, Clickhole, Starwipe, and El Rey), leading a team that has been building the conglomerate’s approach to experimentation outside of the company’s core day-to-day operations.
In this colloquium, Sam will be joined by his colleague Federico Rodriguez Tarditi to discuss what they have learned thus far from Fusion Media Group’s experiments with exploring new ways of telling stories, new approaches to building relationships with key publics important to our portfolio, new ways of working internally, and new types of roles/positions in the company. They will also talk about what they have learned while working with internal teams, academic groups, non-profits, other companies, startups, foundations, and other groups and the challenges of measuring success for experimentation that often exist outside day-to-day media company operations…and some of which may speak more to the company’s larger mission than direct paths to profitability.
Sam Ford is a Vice President at Fusion and Head of Fusion Media Group’s Center for Innovation and Engagement. Federico Rodriguez Tarditi serves as Project Manager for the Center for Innovation and Engagement.

Knowledge’s Allure: Surveillance and Uncertainty
2016-09-15 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sun-ha HongMellon Postdoctoral Fellow
The present age is one of growing faith in machinic knowledge. From state surveillance to self-tracking technologies, we find lofty promises about the power of “raw” data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making. But new claims to knowledge invariably entail a redistribution of uncertainty, of those in the know and those left ignorant, of proofs “good enough” and “negligible” risks. Today, the U.S. government struggles to “prove” the efficacy of its own surveillance programs. The calculability of terrorist threat becomes profoundly indeterminable, exemplified by the figure of the “lone wolf”. Meanwhile, the self-tracking industry promises unerringly objective self-knowledge through machines that know you better than you know yourself. The present struggles with “big” data and surveillance are not just a question of privacy and security, but how promises of knowledge and its bounty enact a redistribution of authority, credibility and responsibility. In short, it is a question of how human individuals become the ingredient for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves.
Sun-ha Hong is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at CMS/W @ MIT, and has a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His writing examines the collective fantasies invested in technology, media and communication.

The Exit Zero Project: A Transmedia Exploration of Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago
2016-09-22 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Christine Walley Professor of Anthropology andDirector of Graduate Studies, HASTS
The Exit Zero Project (www.exitzeroproject.org) is a transmedia exploration of the traumatic effects of the loss of the steel industry in Southeast Chicago, the impact that deindustrialization has had on expanding class inequalities in the United States more broadly, and how Americans talk – and fail to talk – about social class. The project includes an award-winning book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013) authored by Christine Walley, as well as a documentary film, entitled Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2016) made in conjunction with director and filmmaker Chris Boebel. The book and film use first person narration to trace the stories of multiple generations of writer/producer Walley’s family in this once-thriving steel mill community. From the turn-of-the-century experience of immigrants who worked in Chicago’s mammoth industries to the labor struggles of the 1930s to the seemingly unfathomable closure of the steel mills in the 1980s and 90s, these family stories convey a history that serves as a microcosm of the broader national experience of deindustrialization and its economic and environmental aftermath. The project also includes an interactive documentary website with both a storytelling and archival component that is being made in collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. In this talk, Professor Walley will talk about her research into this topic and how it found expression in a book, website, and documentary film.
Walley received a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her first book, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton University Press, 2004), was based on field research exploring environmental conflict in rural Tanzania. Chris Walley and Chris Boebel are also the co-creators and co-instructors of the documentary film production and theory class DV Lab: Documenting Science Through Video and New Media.

Next Stage Planning for the Digital Humanities at MIT
2016-09-29 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Douglas O’ReaganDigital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at MIT, Douglas O’Reagan will study how the digital humanities can best aid the specific strengths, mission, and broader community around MIT. In this talk, O’Reagan will update the audience on his efforts and invite suggestions and ideas concerning the future of digital humanities at MIT.
O’Reagan completed his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2014. His dissertation was a comparative history of the Allied powers’ attempts to study and copy German science and technology during and after the Second World War. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership in UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering from 2014-2015, where he worked with an interdisciplinary team on applying data science, econometric analysis, and historical research in studying the origins and impacts of specific breakthrough technologies. In 2015 he became a visiting assistant professor at Washington State University’s Tri-Cities campus, where he taught history and served as Lead Archivist and Director of the Oral History Program for the Hanford History Project, which manages the US Department of Energy’s collections related to the Hanford site of the Manhattan Project.

This Land Is Our Land: Mobile Media, Protest, and Debate in Maasai and Mongolian Land Disputes
2016-10-06 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Allison HahnAssistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York – Baruch College
How has mobile media changed the ways that nomadic communities receive and send information, engage state actors, and participate in international deliberations? Allison Hahn examines the ways that two pastoral-nomadic communities, Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania and Mongolians of Mongolia and China, are utilizing new media and social media platforms to challenge power hierarchies and deliberative norms. Many governmental policy makers presume that this technological adaptation indicates a determination amongst nomadic communities to integrate and settle. This presentation asks if nomadic communities might instead be incorporating new media technologies as a method to preserve their traditional lifestyles while engaging in national and international deliberations about land policy. Hahn draws from evidence of this engagement found in Maasai and Mongolian use of YouTube, RenRen, Twitter and Facebook as well as in-person protests and her decade of fieldwork amongst pastoral-nomadic communities. In this talk, Hahn focuses on specific examples from Maasai and Mongolian communities, as well as addresses the broader questions of how academics might engage once-distant communities and better understand the complexity of mobile media and nomadic deliberation.
Allison Hahn (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York – Baruch College. Her current book project, Nomads, New Media, and the State (in progress) explores the ways pastoral-nomadic communities in Central Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East are utilizing new and mobile technologies to participate in conservation policy and negotiate land rights.

How Did the Computer Learn to See?
2016-10-13 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Alexander GallowayPhoto by Ivan Brodey
How did the computer learn to see? A common response to the question is that the computer learned to see from cinema and photography, that is, from modernity’s most highly evolved technologies of vision. In this talk we will explore a different response to the question, that the computer learned to see not from cinema but from sculpture. With reference to the work of artists Sarah Oppenheimer and Zach Blas, along with techniques for digital image compression, we will explore the uniquely computational mode of vision.
Alexander Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author of several books, most recently a monograph on the work of François Laruelle, and is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.
