MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Civic Arts Series: Marisa Morán Jahn
2018-10-18 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | MIT Building E15, Room 001 (“The Cube”), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Marisa Morán Jahn – Illustration by Mauricio Cordero
Marisa Morán Jahn is a multi-media artist, writer, educator and activist, whose colorful, often humorous uses of personae and media create imaginative pathways to civic awareness of urgent public issues. Working collaboratively, her projects include a classic American road trip, CareForce One, in a 50-year-old station wagon, advocating issues concerning care workers that became a PBS film series; and Bibliobandido, a story-telling initiative for Honduran children featuring a masked bandit who devours stories. Jahn, winner of numerous awards, is co-founder of Studio REV-, a non-profit organization of artists, technologists, media makers, low-wage workers, immigrants and teens who producing creative media and public art about the issues they face.
She will be sharing Snatch-ural History of Copper (working title), an art project, book, and feature-length film initiated by artist Marisa Morán Jahn that investigates copper, an element found in electrical wires, computers, lightning rods, and the IUD (intrauterine device) implanted in Jahn’s own ‘snatch’ (womb). Jahn interviews a range of experts in search of otherworldly answers that trammel the boundaries of myth, literary studies, science, alchemy and political controversy. Interviewing scientists in Saint Petersburg Florida who use rockets outfitted with a copper nose to trigger (and capture) lightning, Jahn asks, “Do you think that when the lightning goes off I’ll feel it in my cooch?” She visits a shrine on the island of Cyprus, home of the earliest copper mines dating to 8700 BCE as well as the pre-Christian god, Venus of Aphrodite who share the same symbol (♀) most familiar to us today as the symbol for women, females, and a movement for women’s liberation. Throughout these real-world investigations, Jahn seeks access to the top of a building and solder her copper IUD on top of a copper lightning rod, raising its height by an imperceptible inch. “I can’t wait for the moment when a bolt of lightning hits this thing — just imagine my little IUD radiating. It might even be sizzled into a thousand little parts distributed and distended into the atmosphere.” Poetically and playfully weaving the issues into a new cosmology, the film touches upon timely issues such as planetary sustainability, labor, and reproductive self-determination during a moment when both sides of the spectrum mount all-offensive campaigns.
Also featuring…
Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, activist, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Center for Civic Media, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio (codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s first book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement was published by the MIT Press in 2014. They are a board member of Allied Media Projects (AMP); AMP convenes the annual Allied Media Conference and cultivates media strategies for a more just, creative and collaborative world (alliedmedia.org).
Jane M. Saks is a creative collaborator, arts producer, writer, and educator who has worked to challenge and champion issues of gender, sexuality, human rights, race and power within the worlds of arts and culture, politics and civil rights, academia and philanthropy. She is Founding President and Artistic Director of Project& (projectand.org), an organization that creates new models of cultural participation and experience with social impact. Previously, she was the founding Executive Director at the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media where she created the award-winning Fellowship program, developing and launching works that went on to win Pulitzer Prizes, MacArthur Genius Awards, Obie Awards and Guggenheims. She is an invited lecturer at civic, cultural and educational institutions internationally, a visiting critic at Yale University, Regional Judge for the White House Fellows, and will be a visiting Professor at Harvard University. A published poet, Saks has been the Creator, Author, Producer, Co-Producer, Creative Advisor and Series Producer on many original creative works in various media and art forms.
Steve Seidel holds the Patricia Bauman and John Landrum Bryant Chair in Arts in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is Faculty Director of the Arts in Education program and a former director of Project Zero (2000-2008). His current research includes Talking with Artists who Teach, a study of working artists’ ideas and insights into the nature of artistic development and learning. Before becoming a researcher, Seidel taught high-school theater and language arts in the Boston area for 17 years. He has also worked as a professional actor and stage director.

The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters have opened up new pathways to artistic expression that broaden public awareness around compelling civic issues and aspirations of our time.

#MoreThanCode: Practitioner-led Research to Reimagine Technology for Social Justice
2018-10-25 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Our society is in the midst of an extremely urgent conversation about the benefits and harms of digital technology, across all spheres of life. Unfortunately, this conversation too often fails to include the voices of technology practitioners whose work is already focused on social justice, the common good, and/or the public interest. This talk by Sasha Costanza-Chock explores key findings and recommendations from #MoreThanCode (morethancode.cc), a recently-released field scan based on more than 100 practitioner interviews.
* The report was produced by the Tech for Social Justice Project (t4sj.co), co-led by Research Action Design (RAD) and the Open Technology Institute at New America (OTI), together with research partners Upturn, Media Mobilizing Project, Coworker.org, Hack the Hood, May First/People Link, Palante Technology Cooperative, Vulpine Blue, and The Engine Room. NetGain, the Ford Foundation, Mozilla, Code For America, and OTI funded and advised the project.
Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, activist, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s first book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement was published by the MIT Press in 2014. More info: schock.cc.

2018 CMS Alumni Panel
2018-11-01 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, 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.
Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and a 2010 graduate of Comparative Media Studies, is an anthropologist of technology, whose research focuses on the circulation, reproduction, and interpretation of sound. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation research examined the development of algorithmic music recommendation, and at CMS, he wrote a thesis on the history of the player piano.
Colleen Kaman is a user experience strategist at IBM Interactive Experience, skilled in storytelling, user research, learning design, and persuasive technologies. Her expertise is in developing products, services, and campaigns that help users make better decisions and accomplish tasks more effectively and efficiently.
Sean Flynn is the Program Director for the Points North Institute, a Maine-based organization supporting nonfiction storytellers through artist development initiatives and, most prominently, the Camden International Film Festival and Points North Forum. He received his master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies in 2015 and worked as a researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Sean began his filmmaking career as a producer and cinematographer working on two feature-length documentaries, both of which had their premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired on national television.

Civic Arts Series: Myron Dewey
2018-11-15 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 001 (“The Cube”), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
“Protecting the Water in Solidarity and Unity”
Myron Dewey – Illustration by Mauricio Cordero
Myron Dewey is an indigenous journalist, educator, documentary filmmaker and the developer of Digital Smoke Signals, a social networking and filmmaking initiative, emerging out of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline project of 2016-17. Using a full range of contemporary media, including drone technologies, Dewey has pioneered the blending of citizen monitoring, documentary filmmaking, and social networking in the cause of environment, social justice and indigenous people’s rights; he co-directed the 2017 award-winning documentary, Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock.
Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, Comparative Media Studies; Director, Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab and recently awarded MacArthur Fellow.
Respondents
Nicholas A. Brown, Artist, Cultural Geographer, Assoc. Teaching Prof, Northeastern University
Marisa Morán Jahn, Visiting Artist, MIT Art, Culture, Technology
Recent MacArthur Fellow (2018) Lisa Parks is a media scholar whose research focuses on satellite technologies and media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and surveillance. 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 committed to exploring how greater understanding of media systems can inform and assist citizens, scholars and policymakers in the US and abroad to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, social justice, and human rights.
Nicholas A. Brown is a scholar and artist based in Boston, MA and La Farge, WI. He teaches in the School of Architecture and Department of History at Northeastern University. His work examines the production of cultural landscapes and the politics of connectivity in settler colonial contexts. Recent and ongoing projects include: Kickapoo Conversations, A People’s Guide to Firsting and Lasting in Boston, Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest, The Vanishing Indian Repeat Photography Project, and Ni-aazhawa’am-minis Spur.
An artist, filmmaker, and creative technologist of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Morán Jahn’s artworks redistribute power, “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum). Her work has been presented in a range of venues including Obama’s White House, Museum of Modern Art, ITVS/PBS, and worker centers. An awardee of Creative Capital, Sundance, and Tribeca Institute, Jahn is the founder of Studio REV, an art and social justice non-profit organization, an Assistant Professor at The New School, and a Visiting Artist at MIT Art, Culture, Technology.

The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters have opened up new pathways to artistic expression that broaden public awareness around compelling civic issues and aspirations of our time.

The Language of Civic Life: Past to Present
2018-11-29 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Roderick Hart, University of Texas at Austin and the founding director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life
When everyday citizens interact about politics today, they often do so (1) anonymously and (2) in digital space, which results in a kind of aggressive chaos. But what happens when people identify themselves to one another in place-based communities as they do, for example, when writing letters to the editor of their local newspaper? How does that change public discussion?
This talk by Roderick Hart operationalizes the concept of “civic hope” and reports the results of a long-term study of 10,000 letters to the editor written between 1948 and the present in twelve small American cities. Hart’s argument is that the vitality of a democracy lies not in its strengths but in its weaknesses and in the willingness of its people to address those weaknesses without surcease. If democracies were not shot-through with unstable premises and unsteady compacts, its citizens would remain quiet, removed from one another. Disagreements – endless, raucous disagreements – draw them in, or at least enough of them to sustain civic hope.
Roderick Hart is the Allan Shivers Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and the founding director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life. He is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why. He is also the author of DICTION 7.0, a computer program designed to analyze language patterns. Dr. Hart has been inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas and has also been designated Professor of the Year for the State of Texas from the Carnegie/C.A.S.E. Foundation.

Civic Arts Series, “Bringing the War Home”: Visual Aftermaths and Domestic Disturbances in the Era of Modern Warfare
2019-02-20 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caren Kaplan, Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis
At the close of the First Gulf War, feminist architectural historian Beatriz Colomina wrote that “war today speaks about the difficulty of establishing the limits of domestic space.” That conflict of 1990-91 is most often cited as the first to pull the waging of war fully into the digital age and therefore into a blurring of boundaries of all kinds. Yet, most modern wars have introduced technological innovations that transform social relations and modes of communication and representation. In this paper Caren Kaplan focuses on a period that includes the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and extends into the “War on Terror” through a consideration of Martha Rosler’s photo collage series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” (1967-2004). The technique of collage reinforces the artist’s emphatic effort to bring together seemingly incommensurable elements—images of exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities, and landscapes and bodies damaged by warfare. Literally bringing wars waged by the United States throughout this long durée into the hyper commodified environment of fashion layouts and magazine advertisement, Rosler demonstrates the impossibility of limiting domestic space, an impossibility that challenges representation across genres and practices—televisual, photographic, cinematic, social media, analogue, digital, etc. Such disturbances of “here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” resonate as powerful “aftermaths” of wars visible and invisible, always already underway.
Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the UC Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke 2017).

“The Good Stuff”: The Intersections of Work, Leisure, and Relational Bonding on Tumblr and Patreon
2019-02-27 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nicholas-Brie Guarriello
Although the Pokémon GO phenomenon of 2016 has waned, the economies of internet fame and content production remains robust. Drawing from their dissertation, Nick-Brie will discuss the forms of relational work and bonding that occur on YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon, the latter two will be the focus of the talk. Drawing from two years of Internet ethnographic and participant observational work, Nick-Brie will be discussing the political economies and labor demands of micro-celebrity and Influencer culture across social media platforms regarding the Pokémon GO community. This talk suggests that the unpaid, affective labor done on Tumblr serves as a stepping stone to build relationships with one’s audience and fans before garnering support for additional, sustained income. From there, this talk argues that relational bonding work on Patreon is sustained through the various creator-patron interactions and rewards-based system to foster a system of compensation through crowdfunding, yet precarious work under global neoliberal gig economies.
[Accessibility: For those who are low hearing, access copies can be distributed prior to the talk. It is requested that they are given back afterwards. Since this presentation relies heavily on artwork, pictures, and some video, alt-text and alt-audio for those with low or no vision can be made available, if requested. Please contact nbguarr@mit.edu with any other accessibility questions.]
Nicholas-Brie (Nick-Brie) Guarriello joins CMS/W from the University of Minnesota where they are a 4th year Ph.D. Candidate. Their work focuses on audience and fans, Internet celebrity, and digital economies across social media platforms. Currently, their dissertation, titled “A Heart So True?: Relational Labor and Gig Economies in the Pokémon GO Fandom”, specifically focuses on the growth of creative workers within various forms of gig economies on social media platforms. They look at the inter-relations between YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon to theorize what forms of work and labor are now the norm on specific platforms. Since the Pokémon fandom is understudied, they are trying to also think about the potential access gaps or colonial hauntings where some folks are sponsored by industries and partnered with social media platforms whereas others are continually exploited for their labor. Nick-Brie is also a competitive Pokémon Trading Card Game player and you can usually catch them at your local league or a regionals!

Civic Arts Series: Opeyemi Olukemi
2019-03-06 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Introduction by Sarah Wolozin, Director, MIT Open Doc Lab
Opeyemi Olukemi is Executive Producer of POV Spark—the innovation arm of the iconic independent nonfiction film program POV—and Vice President of American Documentary’s Interactive unit. Throughout her career as an interactive producer, funder and public programmer, Opeyemi has created spaces and pipelines for interdisciplinary artists, communities, and creative teams to experiment with and create meaningful innovative content. She is a fierce advocate of technological equity, eliminating bias from social innovation and is deeply invested in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Before joining POV, Opeyemi was the Senior Director of Interactive Programs for Tribeca Film Institute, produced for ScrollMotion and has served as an assistant professor of Integrated Media at Brooklyn College’s Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. Opeyemi has served on numerous festival juries and has mentored through the IDFA’s Doc Academy, New Museum’s NEW INC and Oculus’ VR for Good. She is a proud Rockwood (Ford Foundation) JustFilms Fellow.
Respondent: Marisa Morán Jahn, Visiting Artist and Lecturer, ACT

Stuart Cunningham and David Craig: "Social Media Entertainment"
2019-03-13 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In a little over a decade, competing social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, and their Chinese counterparts, have formed the base for the emergence of a new creative industry: social media entertainment. Social media entertainment creators have harnessed these platforms to generate significantly different content, separate from the century-long model of intellectual property control in the entertainment industries. This new screen ecology is driven by intrinsically interactive viewer- and audience-centricity. Combined, these factors inform a qualitatively different globalization dynamic that has scaled with great velocity, posing new challenges for established screen industries, screen regulatory regimes, as well as media scholars. Social Media Entertainment: The New Industry at the Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley maps the platforms and affordances, content innovation and creative labor, monetization and management, new forms of media globalization, and critical cultural concerns raised by this nascent media industry. Media scholars Stuart Cunningham and David Craig propose challenging, revisionist accounts of the political economy of digital media, the precarious status of creative labor and of media management, and the possibilities of progressive cultural politics in commercializing environments, while offering a new take on media globalization debates.
About Stuart Cunningham and David Craig
Stuart Cunningham is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology. He has authored over a dozen academic titles including Media Economics (Terry Flew, Adam Swift), Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (Jon Silver), Hidden innovation: Policy, industry and the creative sector.
David Craig is a Clinical Associate Professor at USC Annenberg’s School for Communication and Journalism and a Fellow at the Peabody Media Center. Craig is also a veteran media producer and executive nominated for multiple Emmy Awards and responsible for over 30 critically-acclaimed films, TV programs, and stage productions.

Civic Arts Series, "Gaming the Iron Curtain: Computer Games in Communist Czechoslovakia as Entertainment and Activism"
2019-03-20 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jaroslav Švelch, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Bergen
Based on the recent book Gaming the Iron Curtain, this lecture will outline the idiosyncratic and surprising ways in which computer hobbyists in Cold War era Czechoslovakia challenged the power of the oppressive political regime and harnessed early microcomputer technology for both entertainment and activism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovak authorities treated computer and information technologies as an industrial resource rather than a social or cultural phenomenon. While dismissing the importance of home computing and digital entertainment, they sponsored paramilitary computer clubs whose ostensible goal was to train expert cadres for the army and the centrally planned economy. But these clubs soon became a largely apolitical, interconnected enthusiast network, where two forms of tactical resistance could be identified. First, the clubs offered an alternative spaces of communal hobby activity, partially independent of the oppression experienced at work or at school. The club members’ ambitious DIY projects often substituted for the deficiencies of the state-controlled computer industry. Hobbyists not only built joysticks and programmed games, but also introduced new standards for data storage and ran large-scale bottom-up education programs. Second, especially in the late 1980s, local authors started making games that were openly subversive. Several anti-regime text adventure games were made in 1988 and 1989, including The Adventures of Indiana Jones on Wenceslas Square, January 16, 1989, which pitted the iconic Western hero against riot police during an anti-regime demonstration. These games rank among the world’s earliest examples of activist computer games.
About Jaroslav Švelch
Jaroslav Švelch is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen and assistant professor at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the monograph Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018). He has published research on history and theory of computer games, on humor in games and social media, and on the Grammar Nazi phenomenon. His work has been published in journals including New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, or Game Studies, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury and others. He is currently researching history, theory, and reception of monsters in games.

The Battle of Algiers as Ghost Archive: Specters of a Muslim International
2019-04-03 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that poetically captures Algerian resistance to French colonial occupation, is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time, having influenced leftist and anti-colonial struggles from the Palestine Liberation Organization, to the Black Panther Party and the Irish Republican Army amongst others. But the film is more relevant and urgent than ever in the current “War on Terror” – having been screened by the Pentagon in 2003 and taught in Army war colleges as a blueprint for U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. This talk will examine the film as a “ghost archive” of competing narratives, a battleground over the meaning and memory of decolonization and Western power, and a site for challenging the current imperial consensus. As the “War on Terror” expands and the threat of the Muslim looms, the films’ afterlives reveal it to be more than an artifact of the past but rather a prophetic testament to the present and a cautionary tale of an imperial future, as perpetual war has been declared on permanent unrest.
Co-Sponsored by Global Studies & Languages’ French Program.
About Sohail Daulatzai
Sohail Daulatzai, author and founder of Razor Step
Sohail Daulatzai’s is the founder of Razor Step, an L.A. based media lab. His work includes scholarship, essay, short film/video/installation and the curatorial. He is the author and co/editor of several books, including of Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue; Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America; With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism and Empire; Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop; and Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic. He is the curator of the celebrated exhibit Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop and Histories Absolved: Revolutionary Cuban Poster Art and the Muslim International. His video/installation work includes short film essay pieces with Yasiin Bey, a ciné-geography with Zack de la Rocha, as well as an installation piece entitled cas·bah /ˈkazˌbä/noun, 1. A place of confinement for the natives, yet reclaimed. He wrote liner notes for the Sony Legacy Recordings Release of the 20th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set of Rage Against the Machine’s self titled debut album, the liner notes for the DVD release of Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme, the centerpiece in the museum catalog Movement: Hip-Hop in L.A., 1980’s – Now, as well as an essay in iconic photographer Jamel Shabazz’s retrospective Pieces of a Man. His other writings have appeared in Artbound, The Nation, Counterpunch, Al Jazeera, Souls, and Wax Poetics, amongst others. He teaches in Film and Media Studies, African American Studies, and Global Middle East Studies at the University of California, Irvine. More of his work can be found at openedveins.com.

Civic Arts Series: “Thumbs Type and Swipe” featuring DIS's Lauren Boyle
2019-04-10 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lauren Boyle – Illustration by Mauricio Cordero
Introduction by Amy Rosenblum Martín, Independent Curator and Educator, Guggenheim

DIS (est. 2010) is a New York-based collective composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. Its cultural interventions are manifest across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects.
In 2018 the collective transitioned platforms from an online magazine, dismagazine.com, to a video streaming edutainment platform, dis.art, narrowing in on the future of education and entertainment.
DIS Magazine (2010-2017); DISimages (2013), DISown (2014), Curators of the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, The Present in Drag (2016); DIS.art (2018–); Exhibited and organized shows at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; Baltimore Museum of Art; and Project Native Informant, London. DIS has also been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum all in New York; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; ICA Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, among others.
The material presented by DIS today is the result of a change in attitude towards the present and aims to meet the demands of contemporary social, political, and economic complexity at eye level.

Introducer Amy Rosenblum Martín is a bilingual (English/Spanish) curator of contemporary art, committed to equity and community engagement. Formerly a staff curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (when it was MAM) and The Bronx Museum, she has also organized exhibitions, written and/or lectured independently for la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, MoMA, The Metropolitan, MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofía, and Kunsthaus Bregenz as well as the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum. Her 20 years of interdepartmental museum work include 10 years at the Guggenheim. Rosenblum Martín’s expertise is in Latin America, focusing on transhistorical connections among Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Caracas, Havana, Miami, and New York.
She has worked with Janine Antoni, Lothar Baumgarten, Guy Ben-Ner, Janet Cardiff, Eloísa Cartonera, Consuelo Castañeda, Lygia Clark, Willie Cole, Jeannette Ehlers, Teresita Fernández, Naomi Fisher, Marlon Griffith, Lucio Fontana, Dara Friedman, Luis Gispert, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Adler Guerrier, Ann Hamilton, Quisqueya Henríquez, Leslie Hewitt, Nadia Huggins, Deborah Jack, Seydou Keita, Gyula Kosice, Matthieu Laurette, Miguel Luciano, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, Antoni Miralda, Marisa Morán Jahn, Glexis Novoa, Hélio Oiticica, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Manuel Piña, Miguel Angel Ríos, Bert Rodriguez, Marco Roso, Nancy Rubins, George Sánchez-Calderón, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Tomás Saraceno, Karin Schneider, Regina Silveira, Lorna Simpson, Valeska Soares, Javier Tellez, Joaquín Torres García, and Fred Wilson, among many other remarkable artists.

Civic Arts Series, "Do-it Yourself Cinema: Portable Film Projectors as Media History"
2019-04-17 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Haidee WassonIllustration by Mauricio Cordero
Hosted with MIT Arts, Culture, and Technology and The Boston Cinema/Media Seminar.
Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, CMS/W
Haidee Wasson’s talk 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. From its earliest days, film was – in a sense – born portable. Yet, our attention to and affection for the movie theater has obscured our view to the parallel and paradigmatic development of a far more numerous and arguably more significant development: the international, post-war proliferation of portable projectors. These small devices were used widely and for a sizable range of purposes: political, industrial, artistic, cultural. They fundamentally changed the conditions in which films could be seen — and ultimately imagined — as complex projected, often interactive and highly applied, forms. Drawn from a book-length study, this paper will highlight the productivity of “portability” as a concept and practice for opening up our understanding of film history as media history, identifying key insights that expand our understanding of what cinema has long been, a highly iterative media form.
Haidee Wasson is Professor of Film and Media in the School of Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal. She is author or editor of four books, including the award-winning Museum Movies, Inventing Film Studies (with Lee Grieveson) Useful Cinema (with Charles Acland) and Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (with Lee Grieveson). She is the founder of Fieldnotes, an oral history project on the history of film and media studies, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished Service Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her current research investigates the design and expansive use of film projectors by industrial, military and government sectors, exploring the transformation of cinema from an entertainment machine into a highly diversified display and performance device.

POSTPONED: “No Yankee Rule for Us”: Annexation Rumors and the Interwar Circum-Caribbean Black Press
2019-05-01 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
We hope to reschedule this event for the 2019/2020 academic year.

Reena N. GoldthreeAssistant Professor of African American StudiesPrinceton University
In the aftermath of World War I, rumors that the United States was planning to annex the islands of the British West Indies swept across the Caribbean, sparking panics in Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, and elsewhere. Annexation rumors were transmitted by sailors and migrants as well as by the cosmopolitan circum-Caribbean black press, which reprinted stories from throughout the Americas. In this talk, Reena N. Goldthree, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, examines how Caribbean newspapers–published in the islands and in the diaspora–both facilitated the spread of annexation rumors and provided a crucial platform for West Indians to challenge U.S. imperial expansion.

Christopher Weaver, “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”
2019-09-12 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Christopher Weaver
While the appeal of games may be universal and satisfy our innate desire to play, the powerful dynamics that govern our behavior within games is even more interesting than the play itself. Can we broaden our understanding of play mechanisms by applying the subliminal mechanics of play beyond games? Join Christopher Weaver, Founder of Bethesda Softworks, who teaches engineering and computational media respectively at MIT and Wesleyan, as he explores these important issues in a lecture entitled “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”. Prof. Weaver will discuss how games work and why they are such potent tools in areas as disparate as military simulation, childhood education, and medicine.
Christopher Weaver is Research Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Comparative Media Studies, Visiting Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Microphotonics Center and Distinguished Professor of Computational Media at Wesleyan University.
Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry Scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual Masters Degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, Weaver founded Bethesda Softworks, and developed a physics-based, realtime sports engine used to create the original John Madden Football for Electronic Arts. Bethesda is well known for The Elder Scrolls role-playing series of which Skyrim was the latest major installment. An adviser to both government and industry, Weaver holds patents in interactive media, security, and telecommunications engineering.

Ian Condry, “Sound, Learning and Democracy: The Curvature of Social Space-Time through Japanese Music, from Underground Techno to Pop Idols”
2019-09-19 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Ian Condry, cultural anthropologist in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
The talk will explore 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. How can music help us understand the curvature of social space-time? What does this mean for our understanding of society, culture, and media?
Ian Condry is a cultural anthropologist in the department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT, where he has taught since 2002. He is the author of two books, Hip-Hop Japan and The Soul of Anime, both of which have been translated into Japanese. He organizes the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project and a new initiative called Dissolve Music,which brings together musicians, sound artists, technologists and educators to use audio experiences to dissolve the structures of inequality.

Nick Montfort, “Poet/Programmers, Artist/Programmers, and Scholar/Programmers: What and Who Are They?”
2019-09-26 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick Montfort, Professor of Digital Media at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Computer programming is a general-purpose way of using computation. It can be instrumental (oriented toward a predefined end, as with the development of well-specified apps and Web services) or exploratory (used for artistic work and intellectual inquiry). Professor Nick Monfort’s emphasis in this talk, as in his own work, is on exploratory programming, that type of programming which can be used as part of a creative or scholarly methodology. He will say a bit about his own work but will use much of the discussion to survey how many other poet/programmers, artist/programmers, and scholar/programmers are creating radical new work and uncovering new insights.
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. Recent books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press) and several books of computational poetry: Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2×6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.

Helen Elaine Lee: "Pomegranate"
2019-10-03 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Helen Elaine Lee
At this week’s colloquium, 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. Professor Lee, who teaches writing in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is also Director of MIT’s Program in Women’s & Gender Studies. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Her first novel, The Serpent’s Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second novel, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short story “Blood Knot” appeared in the spring 2017 issue of Ploughshares and the story “Lesser Crimes” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Callaloo. She recently finished The Unlocked Room, a novel about a group of people who are incarcerated in two neighboring U.S. prisons and the woman who comes to teach them poetry as she searches for her lost brother.

Anushka Shah, “How Entertainment Can Help Fix the System”
2019-10-10 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Anushka Shah, founder of Civic Studios and the Civic Entertainment project at the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab.
Around the world, citizens are saying the system is broken. If it’s education and schools one day, it’s healthcare the next. Our trust in politics and public institutions is falling globally, and our confidence in the ability to solve problems around us is teetering.
Can entertainment and pop culture be a way out? Can films, television shows, and digital content become spaces to teach us how to fix our systems? Can we create influential media that changes how we talk about identity, social justice, public institutions, and citizen power?
In this talk, Anushka Shah, founder of the production house Civic Studios and the Civic Entertainment project at the MIT Media Lab, explores how entertainment can provide alternate narratives of citizen participation.
Shah’s Civic Entertainment project explores the intersection of civic participation with film, television, radio, theatre and digital entertainment. The project focuses on researching the media effects of fiction towards thought and behavior change, explores how methods of social change available to citizens can be best represented in entertainment media, and investigates the representation of protest and activism in current popular culture.
Her production firm Civic Studios focuses on creating such civic entertainment content for Indian audiences. The aim of the content is to empower audiences by addressing the lack of trust in public institutions, knowledge of government and democratic systems, and increasing self-efficacy to participate in change as a citizen.
Originally from Mumbai, India, Anushka divides her time between Mumbai, Boston, and Chicago. She has a background in applied statistics and digital text analysis, and has also previously worked with non-profits and political parties in India.

Vivek Bald, “If I Could Reach the Border...”
2019-10-17 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vivek Bald, filmmaker and Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media
Vivek Bald, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media, 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. He will also provide an update on his documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem, recently funded by the PBS-affiliated Center for Asian American Media, and currently being edited by Comparative Media Studies master’s alum, Beyza Boyacioglu. Between the essay and film, Bald will reflect on South Asian American experiences of multi-racial identity and histories of cross-racial community-making.
Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013).

William Uricchio, “Why Co-Create? And Why Now? Reports from A Field Study”
2019-10-24 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
William Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab
Co-Creation is picking up steam as a claim, aspiration, and buzz-word du jour. But what is and why does it matter? Drawing on a just-released field study, Collective Wisdom, this session will address those questions and explore the method’s implications for just and equitable creation. It will consider co-creation in the arts with communities, across disciplines and organizations, and with non-humans (both biological and AI systems), calling out precedents and best practices in a broad array of communities, including historically marginalized groups. What are the trends, opportunities, and challenges bound up in co-creation and its various deployments, and why it is increasingly urgent in our time?
William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He, together with Katerina Cizek, authored Collective Wisdom — a field study on co-creation. His current research considers co-creation, documentary, and the epistemological crisis that characterizes our time.

Lucy Suchman, “Artificial Intelligence & Modern Warfare”
2019-11-07 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lucy Suchman, Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
In June of 2018, following a campaign initiated by activist employees within the company, Google announced its intention not to renew a US Defense Department contract for Project Maven, an initiative to automate the identification of military targets based on drone video footage. Defendants of the program argued that that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of US drone operations, not least by enabling more accurate recognition of those who are the program’s legitimate targets and, by implication, sparing the lives of noncombatants. But this promise begs a more fundamental question: What relations of reciprocal familiarity does recognition presuppose? And in the absence of those relations, what schemas of categorization inform our readings of the Other? The focus of a growing body of scholarship, this question haunts not only US military operations but an expanding array of technologies of social sorting. Understood as apparatuses of recognition (Barad 2007: 171), Project Maven and the US program of targeted killing are implicated in perpetuating the very architectures of enmity that they take as their necessitating conditions. Taking any apparatus for the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force as problematic, this talk joins a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, infrastructures and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. 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. She closes with some thoughts on how we might interrupt the workings of these apparatuses, in the service of wider movements for social justice.
Lucy Suchman is a Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom.

Eric Klopfer, “Design Based Research on Participatory Simulations”
2019-11-14 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Eric Klopfer
An important part of the work done at the The Education Arcade is based on a process of Design Based Research (DBR). In DBR, we design products that are meant to fill real classroom needs and then iteratively test and refine them. Eric Klopfer and The Education Arcade are currently working on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games.
During this talk, attendees will have a chance to play a couple of these games and participate in a design discussion with one of the games that is currently in progress.
Professor Klopfer, currently Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. He is also a co-faculty director for MIT’s J-WEL World Education Lab.

Paloma Duong, “Portable Postsocialisms [postsocialismos de bolsillo]”
2019-11-21 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Paloma Duong, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies
How do Cuban culture and media register the defining aspects of its transformation at the turn of the 21st century: the expansion of transnational capitalist markets, the proliferation of digital media, and the simultaneous reorganization of its official state ideology and its social imaginaries? This talk will explore competing narratives about Cuba’s postsocialist moment across a range of cultural and media practices—from music to memes—inviting us to consider whether we can continue to frame Cuba as a regional exception. We will also examine 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.
Paloma Duong is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at MIT. At the intersection of cultural studies, media theory, and political philosophy, Paloma researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. She is currently writing Portable Postsocialisms: Culture and Media in 21st century Cuba, a book-length study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Art Margins, and Cuban Counterpoints: Public Scholarship about a Changing Cuba.

T.L. Taylor, “Play as Transformative Work”
2019-12-05 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
T.L. Taylor, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT
Professor of Comparative Media Studies T.L. Taylor will explore the ways game live streamers are transforming their otherwise private play into public entertainment. She will focus on this new form of creative labor and offer a challenge to current models of IP and fandom, suggesting the work of professional live streamers is not easily captured by non-commercial frameworks nor simple work/play dichotomies.
T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies and co-founder and Director of Research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to supporting and developing fair and inclusive esports. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades. Dr. Taylor’s research explores the interrelations between culture and technology in online leisure environments. Her book Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, 2012) chronicles the rise of esports and professional computer gaming. Her book about game live streaming – Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton University Press) – is now out and is the first of its kind to chronicle this emerging media space.

Matthew Berland, “Creative Agency: Making, Learning, and Playing towards Understanding Computational Content”
2020-02-13 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Matthew Berland, Associate Professor of Design, Informal, and Creative Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
People often learn complex computational content most easily and deeply when they have “creative agency” – the social network, ability, skills, resources, and support to collaboratively and playfully make creative computational content in feedback-rich environments. This talk will present a lens on how we can create environments where learners are supported in developing creative agency, and how we might assess or evaluate success. Matthew Berland will cover his projects in museums, computer science classrooms, after-school clubs, and universities, showing how we can use design-based research, learning analytics, and games to enable creative agency towards more equitable outcomes and better understand how, why, and when people make and learn complex computational content together.
Matthew Berland is an Associate Professor of Design, Informal, and Creative Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spending 2019-2020 as a visiting scholar in CMS/W at MIT. In addition, he is the director of the UW Games Program and the Complex Play Lab and Affiliate Faculty in Computer Sciences, Information Studies, STS, and the Learning Sciences. He uses design-based research and learning analytics to design, create, and study learning environments that support students’ creativity in learning computational literacies, systems literacies, and computer science & engineering content.

Desmond Upton Patton, “Contextual Analysis of Social Media: The Promise and Challenge of Eliciting Context in Social Media Posts with Natural Language Processing”
2020-02-20 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Desmond Upton Patton, Associate Professor of Social Work, Columbia University
While natural language processing affords researchers an opportunity to automatically scan millions of social media posts, there is growing concern that automated computational tools lack the ability to understand context and nuance in human communication and language. Columbia University’s Desmond Upton Patton introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in social media data. The Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach considers and critiques the gap between inadequacies in natural language processing tools and differences in geographic, cultural, and age-related variance of social media use and communication. CASM utilizes a team-based approach to analysis of social media data, explicitly informed by community expertise. The team uses CASM to analyze Twitter posts from gang-involved youth in Chicago. They designed a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of a support vector machine using CASM hand-labeled posts against a distant model. They found that the CASM-informed hand-labeled data outperforms the baseline distant labels, indicating that the CASM labels capture additional dimensions of information that content-only methods lack. They then question whether this is helpful or harmful for gun violence prevention.

Marina Bers, “Coding in Early Childhood: Storytelling or Puzzle Solving?”
2020-02-27 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Marina Bers, Tufts University
Computer programming is an essential skill in the 21st century and new policies and frameworks are in place for preparing students for computer science. Today, the development of new interfaces and block-programming languages, facilitates the teaching of coding and computational thinking starting in kindergarten. However, as new programming languages that are developmentally appropriate emerge, it is not enough to copy models developed for older children, which mostly grew out of traditional STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) disciplines and instructional practices. In this talk, Prof. Marina Bers will describe current research on a pedagogical approach for early childhood computer science education called “Coding as Another Language” (CAL), grounded on the principle that learning to program involves learning how to use a new language (a symbolic system of representation) for communicative and expressive functions. Due to the critical foundational role of language and literacy in the early years, the teaching of computer science can be augmented by models of literacy instruction. Case studies of young children using either the KIBO robot or the ScratchJr app, designed by Prof Bers, to illustrate the instructional practices of CAL curriculum will be presented, as well as novel approaches using fMRI to explore what regions of the brain activate when coding.

Marina Umaschi Bers (tufts.edu/~mbers01) is a professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote children’s positive development. She also developed and serves as director of the graduate certificate program on Early Childhood Technology at Tufts University.
Prof. Bers is passionate about using the power of technology to promote positive development and learning for young children. Bers’ philosophy and theoretical approach as well as the curriculum and assessment methods can be found in her books “Coding as Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom” (Routledge, 2018); “The Official ScratchJr Book” (2015; No Starch Press); “Designing Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: From Playpen to Playground” (2012, Oxford University Press); and “Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom” (2008; Teacher’s College Press).
Prof. Bers loves teaching and in 2016 she received the Outstanding Faculty Contribution to Graduate Student Studies award at Tufts University which recognizes her mentorship.

Shawna Kidman, “The Infrastructure of the U.S. Comic Book Industry and the Long History of Superheroes in Hollywood”
2020-03-05 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Shawna Kidman, Assistant Professor, University of California San Diego
This talk will discuss the history of the American comic book industry during the 20th century. This medium has dominated the film and television landscape in recent years, and has come to define contemporary corporate transmedia production. But before moving to the center of mainstream popular culture, comic books spent half a century wielding their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business. Dr. Kidman will argue that the best way to understand the immense influence of this relatively small business is through a political economic analysis. Specifically, she will discuss industrial infrastructure—the aspects of our media environment that often lack public visibility, including distribution, copyright and contract law, and financing. These systems channeled the industry’s growth and ultimately gave the medium its shape. Accordingly, a closer look at the everyday intricacies of the business yields a very different kind of narrative about what comic books are and how they came to be. It also helps explain why comic books and comic book strategies became so central to media production in the 21st century, and why these trends are likely to persist well into the future.
Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego where she teaches courses in media studies. Her research on the media industries has been published in Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood (UC Press, 2019), a history of the U.S. comic book industry’s convergence with the film and television business. Before earning her PhD in Critical Media Studies at USC, Shawna worked in the media business, including as a creative executive at DC Comics.

POSTPONED UNTIL SPRING 2021: Meghan Sutherland, “Variety, Genealogy, History: On the Politics of Media Convergence”
2020-03-12 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Meghan SutherlandAssociate Professor of Cinema and Visual StudiesUniversity of Toronto
This talk illuminates a bond between the variety form, the concept of genealogy, and the colonial logics of racial, ethnic and sexual differentiation that have defined the project of modern liberalism as one of social and technological development. In doing so, it aims to recast the phenomenon of “media convergence” as a matter of aesthetic form that is not only fundamental to the biopolitical imaginary of liberalism and neoliberalism, but is fundamental as well to the idea of governmental “technology” on which the latter is predicated–a scenario that stands to change how we think about the political entanglement of form and technology more broadly.
Meghan Sutherland is Associate Professor of Cinema and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto and a founding co-editor of the online journal World Picture. She is also the author of The Flip Wilson Show (Wayne State University Press, 2008) and a forthcoming book called Variety: The Extra Aesthetic and the Constitution of Modern Media (Duke University Press), and her essays on the intersections between media, philosophy and politics have appeared in a range of different journals and edited volumes.
