Boundary Lines? Deepfakes Weaponized Against Journalists and Activists
2020-09-17 12:00 - 12:45 (America/New_York) | MA
Deepfakery: A Livestream Talk Series and Exploration of Critical Questions

Kishonna Gray, "Intersectional Tech: Exploring the Black Cultural Production of Gamers in Transmediated Culture"
2020-09-17 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

With this presentation, Dr. Kishonna Gray illustrates a framework for studying the intersectional development of technological artifacts and systems and their impact on Black cultural production and social processes. Using gaming as the glue that binds this project, she puts forth intersectional tech as a framework to make sense of the visual, textual, and oral engagements of marginalized users, exploring the complexities in which they create, produce, and sustain their practices. Gaming, as a medium often outside conversations on Blackness and digital praxis, is one that is becoming more visible, viable, and legible in making sense of Black technoculture. Intersectional tech implores us to make visible the force of discursive practices that position practices within (dis)orderly social hierarchies and arrangements. The explicit formulations of the normative order are sometimes in disagreement with the concrete human condition as well as inconsistent with the consumption and production practices that constitute Black digital labor. It is, in fact, these practices that inform the theoretical underpinnings of Black performances, cultural production, exploited labor, and resistance strategies inside oppressive technological structures that Black users reside.

Engaging intersectionality across transmediated platforms reveals a significant moment of critiquing narratives, creating content, and controlling narratives. The aftermath of Mike Brown’s death in 2014, for instance, revealed the power of this innovative engagement that the once-invisible could now actively engage, participate, and produce content in hypervisible ways. In the context of #BlackLivesMatter, the combination of the textual and the visual ignited not only a movement, but a proclamation of reclaiming narratives and identities across media and platforms – from BlackLivesMatter to Black-ish to “The Breakfast Club.” It is important to examine the everydayness of mediated, intersectional, counterpublics to examine Black oral, visual, and textual culture in digital spaces and how this manifests within gaming culture. The transmediated nature of contemporary gaming communities affords the possibility of reframing traditional narratives, controlling and producing content, sustaining Black cultural production.

Dr. Kishonna L. Gray (@kishonnagray) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois – Chicago. Dr. Gray is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar and digital herstorian whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, video games, and Black Cyberfeminism. Dr. Gray’s recent monograph, Intersectional Tech: The Transmediated Praxis of Black Users in Digital Gaming (LSU Press, 2020) explores the visual, textual, and/or oral engagement of the Black body in transmediated spaces, focusing on the critical deconstruction of the exploited, hypervisible, labor of any associated Black performances (online and ‘IRL’).

She is also the author of Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014) co-editor of Feminism in Play (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018) and Woke Gaming (University of Washington Press, 2018). Dr. Gray has published in a variety of outlets across disciplines and has also been featured in public outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, The New York Times, Business Insider, CNET, BET, and others.

Manipulating Memories: Archives, History and Deepfakes
2020-09-24 12:00 - 12:45 | MA

Justin Reich, "Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education"
2020-09-24 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

In the 2000s and 2010s, education technology evangelists promised that new learning media would transform schooling and education. Then, a pandemic shut down schools all over the world, and online learning face a pivotal moment, and left a global public mostly disappointed. Instead of adaptive tutors, artificial intelligence, MOOCs or other new technologies, most learners got digital worksheets on learning management systems and ZOOM lecturers. Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education explores the recent history of large scale learning technologies to explain why technology provides such uneven support—useful in some contexts but not others, to some people but not others—to learners. The book concludes by examining four as-yet intractable dilemmas that learning media researchers and designers can use to identify persistent challenges in using technology to accelerate human learning.

Justin Reich is the Mitsui Career Development Professor of Comparative Media at MIT, and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. He is the host of the TeachLab podcast, the author of the forthcoming book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education from Harvard University Press, and the instructor for six massive open online courses on EdX and available through the MIT Open Learning Library.

Still Funny?: Satire, Deepfakes, and Human Rights Globally
2020-10-01 12:00 - 12:45 | MA

Jing Wang, "Walking Around Obstacles: Nonconfrontational Activists in Gray China"
2020-10-01 17:00 - 18:30 | Fall 2020 Colloquium Livestream, Cambridge, 02139
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

Is there digital activism in China? What is it like to be an activist running a grassroots NGO in a land of censors? Is the state-public relationship in China antagonistic by default as our mainstream media would like us to believe? Are citizens of illiberal societies brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear? This talk challenges some of the binary assumptions we make about activism and China by bringing our attention to the gray zones in China where nonconfrontational activists are building an invisible and quiet coalition to bring incremental progress to their society. Wang will talk about NGO2.0, a grassroots organization she founded in China, provide examples of nonconfrontational activism staged on Weibo and WeChat, and introduce Future Village, a design4good project that calls for multi-sectoral collaboration that NGO2.0 is building.

Jing Wang is the founder and director of MIT New Media Action Lab and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board for Creative Commons China. She is also the founder and secretary-general of NGO2.0, a grassroots nonprofit organization based in Beijing and Shenzhen. Her current research interests include entertainment media in China and the US, advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, and nonprofit technology.

Eric Gordon, "Towards a Meaningfully Inefficient Smart City"
2020-10-08 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

Mainstream “smart” city discourse offers a technocentric, efficiency-driven utopian fantasy that elides or exacerbates many urban problems of the past and present. Significant critical literature has emerged in recent years that highlights the importance of lived experience in smart cities, wherein values of equity, quality of life, and sustainability are prioritized. This literature has focused on models that center people in the design and implementation of smart city plans. Instead of maximizing efficiency, these models strategically produce what I call meaningful inefficiencies into process and outcomes, or the intentionally designed productive lag in a system wherein users are able to explore, connect, and invent in a non-prescribed fashion. In this talk, Visiting Professor Eric Gordon will discuss a recent project in Boston, MA in collaboration with the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, called Beta Blocks, that uses meaningful inefficiency as a structuring logic for sourcing, questioning and making decisions about public realm technologies.

Eric Gordon is a visiting professor in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT and a professor of Media Art at Emerson College, where he directs the Engagement Lab. His research focuses on the transformation of public life and governance in digital culture, and the incorporation of play into collaborative design processes. He is the editor of Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016) and the author of Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Laura Partain, “Race and Representation of Syrian, Palestinian, and Norwegian Refugees in the News”
2020-10-15 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

This talk will discuss contemporary US feelings towards Syrian and Palestinian refugee resettlement and expectations for “appropriate” refugee attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Laura Partain’s findings come out of a generalizable experimental analysis conducted with native-born US citizens in December of 2019. Putting these views into an historical context, she explains that what might immediately be perceived as unexpected experimental results are actually the logical evolution of the 20th and 21st century US racial episteme: US participants are more likely to support the resettlement of darker phenotype refugees, but hold more amicable views of lighter phenotype refugees. Moreover, participants’ association with the Christian faith identity was the most reliable predictor of anti-immigrant views. During this discussion, Laura will tie her research into ongoing conversations about nationalism and national belonging, as well as the ways in which social-expectations placed on displaces peoples can limit their access to civic, medical, and everyday resources.

Laura Partain is a Visiting Lecturer in Civic and Global Media within MIT’s CMS/W. She researches complex news and social media effects on marginalized communities’ access to socio-political, material, and medical resources. Her scholarship is located at the interstices of citizenship status and national belonging. Laura’s work uses experimental analyses to develop media interventions for prejudice reduction and focuses on the media effects of racial, religious, and ethnic identity representations. Laura has worked with communities in Syria, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, and Iran, but also works with these communities who are forcibly displaced in diaspora (i.e. refugees, asylum seekers) as well as with Arab and Muslim Americans more broadly. Her published research includes articles in the Journal of Applied Communication Research and Communication Methods and Measures, among others.

Elinor Carmi, “Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media”
2020-10-22 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Media Distortions is about the power behind producing deviant media categories. It shows the politics behind categories we take for granted such as spam and noise, and what it means to our broader understanding of, and engagement with media. The book synthesizes media theory, sound studies, STS, feminist technoscience, and software studies into a new composition to explore media power. Media Distortions argues that using sound as a conceptual framework is more useful due to its ability to cross boundaries and strategically move between multiple spaces – which is essential for multi-layered mediated spaces. The book introduces two main concepts – Processed Listening and Rhythmedia – to analyze multiplicities of mediated spaces, people and objects.

Drawing on repositories of legal, technical and archival sources, the book amplifies three stories about the construction and negotiation of the ‘deviant’ in media. The book starts in the early 20th century with Bell Telephone’s production of noise in the training of their telephone operators and their involvement with the Noise Abatement Commission in New York City. The next story jumps several decades to the early 2000s focusing on web metric standardization in the European Union and shows how the digital advertising industry constructed what is legitimate communication while illegitimizing spam. The final story focuses on the recent decade and the way Facebook constructs unwanted behaviors to engineer a sociality that produces more value. These stories show how deviant categories re-draw boundaries between human and non-human, public and private spaces, and importantly – social and antisocial.

About Elinor Carmi

Elinor Carmi is a researcher, journalist and ex-radio broadcaster who has a passion for technology, digital rights, and feminism. In the past 8 years she has been examining internet standards, specifically the development of the digital advertising ecosystem such as advertising networks, real-time-bidding, and web-cookies/pixels. Currently Dr. Carmi is a Research Associate at Liverpool University, UK, working on several projects: 1) “Me and My Big Data – Developing Citizens’ Data Literacies” Nuffield Foundation funded project; 2) “Being Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity” UKRI funded project; 3) Digital inclusion with the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). On February 2020, Carmi was invited to give evidence on digital literacy for the House of Lords’ Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies, at the British Parliament in London, UK. In addition, she has been invited by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a scientific expert to be part of the closed discussions to establish the foundations of Infodemiology. Before academia, Elinor worked in the electronic dance music industry for various labels, was a radio broadcaster and a music television editor for almost a decade. In 2013, she published a book about the Israeli Psytrance culture titled “TranceMission: The Psytrance Culture in Israel 1989-1999” (Resling Publishing). She also tweets @Elinor_Carmi.

Lana Swartz, "New Money: How Payment Became Social Media"
2020-10-29 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Lana Swartz, ’09, is joined by Aswin Punathambekar, ’03, to discuss Swartz’s new book New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale University Press). New Money frames money as a media technology, one in major transition, and interrogates the consequences of those changes.

Lana Swartz is an Assistant Professor in Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and a 2009 graduate of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies master’s program. Prior to New Money, she published Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff (MIT Press). Aswin Punathambekar is Swartz’s colleague at UVa’s Department of Media Studies, where he is an Associate Professor. He graduated from the Comparative Media Studies program in 2003 and is co-author of the upcoming (provisionally-titled) The Digital Popular: Media, Culture, and Politics in Networked India.

Patricia Saulis, “Creating Space for Balance: Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science — Two-Eyed Seeing — in Environmental Justice and Media”
2020-11-05 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Two-eyed seeing has been a contemporary concept by two Indigenous Mikmaq Elders in Cape Breton Canada. Through the use of Indigenous Oral Tradition, Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Dr. Murdena Marshall have participated in many recordings of their concept and teachings. Their appearances at conferences across Canada and the United States provided many venues to share their work. In this presentation, Patricia Saulis will feature clips of the Elders speaking and provide some perspective on how their work could be brought forward in discussions of Environmental Justice and Media.

About Patricia Saulis

Patricia Saulis is Executive Director of the Maliseet Nation Conservation Council and a member of the Maliseet tribe of Indigenous people, whose lands lie along the Saint John River watershed on both sides of the US and Canadian border in Northeast Maine and Southern New Brunswick. Ms. Saulis is an experienced tribal policy administrator, environmentalist, and educational planner, and has a very extensive background working in tribal organizations on matters of social well-being, education and environmental sustainability.

In the midst of a highly fluid environment of changing political, economic, partnership, and financial circumstances, Ms. Saulis keeps the mission of restoring Wolastoq/St John Watershed in accordance with Maliseet rights and cultural stewardship squarely in her sights.

Ms. Saulis also has an impressive background in public health issues and policy surrounding First Nations communities throughout Canada. These experiences cover the breadth of important and current issues that impact Indigenous communities and represent her strong background and commitment in ensuring the betterment of not just her own Indigenous community but those of the entirety of North America.

Adam Charles Hart, "Beyond the Living Dead: Treasures from the George A. Romero Archive"
2020-11-12 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
With his 1968 debut Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero helped to inaugurate a new era of both horror film and independent cinema, and introduced the world to the zombie as we know it today: re-animated corpses, stumbling towards the living in search of flesh, a ghoulish new kind of monster that has, in the subsequent half-century, become an essential part of the world’s cultural imaginary. From that moment on, Romero would become known as the maker of zombie movies, directing 5 more films set in the Living Dead universe, an artist completely identified with that initial monstrous creation.

Romero is a complex figure in American cinema. He worked outside the normal systems of financing and distribution for most of his career, choosing to live and work in Pittsburgh, where he built an industry and a community. But while being far from Hollywood ensured that access to funding for his projects would be severely limited, and often contingent on his branding as the director of the “Dead” movies. The immense, global impact of Night of the Living Dead ensured he could have a career, but it restricted the scope and range of that career.

However, Romero’s archives paint a different picture. The University of Pittsburgh has acquired the George A. Romero Archival Collection, a massive archive that includes materials from the full span of his career, from his earliest short films to his final projects. There are drafts of genre classics like Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead that show their evolution throughout the process of pre-production, supplemented by boxes and boxes of documents detailing their production and reception. But the largest and most revelatory component of the archive is the hundreds of projects that Romero never got to make. He only made 16 features in his lifetime, but he was a hugely prolific writer, with dozens and dozens of complete screenplays and many many more proposals, treatments, and partial works.

This talk will give a brief overview of the material in the archive, focusing on what the unfilmed and unpublished projects tell us about Romero’s larger themes, with pictures and clips of work from the archive that has rarely or never before been publicly viewed, and how that work recontextualizes his genre films. It will then focus on the specific case study of his early approaches to “found footage” mockumentary horror, which he tied to multiple projects about Bigfoot and other pre-human creatures and communities, before incorporating it into his 2006 zombie movie, Diary of the Dead.

About Adam Charles Hart

Adam Charles Hart is the author of Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media (Oxford UP). He has taught at Harvard University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Pittsburgh, and is currently a Visiting Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Library. His writings on horror films and video games and on the American avant-garde cinema have appeared in Discourse, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Imaginations, Studies in the Fantastic, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, and the edited collections Gothic Cinema (Edinburgh UP) and Companion to the Horror Film (Wiley-Blackwell UP). He is currently at work on two monographs: a critical study of the work of George A. Romero and a history and theory of handheld cinematography in film, television, and video called The Living Camera: The History, Politics, and Style of Handheld Cinematography from 16mm to GoPro.

Mauricio Cordero, “BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail”
2020-11-19 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
In 2018, the United States enacted a “zero tolerance” policy which criminalized the act of seeking asylum. In June 2019, the inhumane conditions in detention camps across the border were revealed, and several weeks later the BORDERx project was established.

BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail is a comic anthology that examines the border crisis from a variety of points of view and narrative formats, featuring 70 contributors from all over the world. Proceeds from the project go to South Texas Human Rights Center. Why address the issue with comics? How did we accomplish this enormous project in months instead of years? What were the financial considerations? What are the next steps for BORDERx? How can this platform serve other social issues?This talk will walk us through the project from origin to completion. Mauricio Cordero, the project founder, will discuss the journey with Prof. James Paradis, offering insights and examples from the work.​

About Mauricio Cordero

Mauricio Cordero has worked in the arts and underground scene since the 1980’s. He established the fanzine, CAUTION! and served as the education coordinator and program director at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (ICA). In France, he opened his own art gallery in Tours. Returning to the U.S. he served as executive director at the Revolving Museum and was also a founding co-director of Mill No. 5, an indoor Victorian streetscape.

Cordero now teaches comics primarily and is a part-time lecturer at MIT. He is currently teaching Making Comics and Sequential Art and lecturing in The Visual Story-Graphic Novel.

His work has been published in Double Nickels Forever, Dollars and Sense, MIT’s GradX Comix series and Fashion Institute of Technology’s Black Stories Matter. BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail is available at all major online retailers and through the website www.border-x.com.​

Reworking the Archive: The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project
2020-12-03 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
What are some unexplored ways that online environments can help us rethink “the archive”? How might i-doc storytelling tools expand what an archive can be as well as public engagement with history itself? This presentation explores these questions through a demonstration of the online Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project. The project is based on a collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum, a small volunteer-led museum in a diverse former steel mill region. The digital archive highlights objects saved and donated by community residents, what those items meant to donors, and the stories told around and through these objects. The website uses a variety of online storytelling techniques to help viewers connect with the objects and the histories from which they emerge. It also highlights how the historic conflicts found in this multi-racial working-class community – including those around labor, immigration, racial, and environmental struggles – continue to resonate in the contemporary moment. The website helps diverse working-class histories come alive for viewers through both objects and the spoken word in ways that are simultaneously striking and reflective of everyday life. Presenters include creative director and i-doc pioneer Jeff Soyk and the project directors, anthropologist Chris Walley and filmmaker Chris Boebel.

Jeff Soyk is an award-winning media artist with credits as creative director and UI/UX designer on PBS Frontline’s Inheritance (2016 News & Documentary EMMY winner and Peabody-Facebook Award winner) as well as art director, UI/UX designer and architect on Hollow (2013 Peabody Award winner and News & Documentary EMMY nominee).

Christine J. Walley is a Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is the award-winning author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and a co-creator of a documentary film Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2017).

Chris Boebel is Director of Media Development at MIT Open Learning, where he oversees media production for professional education and explores the uses of media in education, including VR and interactive media. A filmmaker by training, he has produced and directed feature films, documentaries, and television. His work has been shown on many networks around the world, including PBS and the BBC, and at more than 50 film festivals, including Sundance.

Charisse L'Pree, “What is a Media Psychography? A 20-year Methodological Journey”
2021-02-25 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
What is your relationship with media technologies? When we say things like “I love television,” “I hate the internet,” or “I can’t live without music, ” we implicitly answer this question without explicitly asking it. In her new book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love (Routledge 2021), Dr. Charisse L’Pree (MIT SB ’03 CMS, SB ’03 Course 9) addresses the strange love that we have with communication technology – specifically over the past 150 years – and how these relationships with past mediums inform our relationships with newer technologies.

In this talk, L’Pree discusses the role of interdisciplinary research and how she has maneuvered a wide variety of methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, critical, and applied, in order to answer life’s questions.

L’Pree provides here the first chapter for your listening or reading pleasure ahead of time:

Downloadable .mp3Audio stream (captioned)Chapter text as PDF

The live talk will focus on the value of cross-methodology research – not just mixed methods – and answer questions from students regarding their own research projects.

You can also read her recent interview (Part 1) with Henry Jenkins here on the complexity on writing a historiography of the psychology of media: http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2021/2/1/an-interview-with-charisse-lpree-corsbie-massay

At Syracuse University, Charisse L’Pree teaches classes on communication and diversity to professional media students, specifically how do media affect our understanding of different social categories and how do the social categories of media producers affect the media with which we all engage. She has mentored over 50 McNair Scholars across disciplines at the University of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University, and Syracuse University since 2008 and was awarded Teacher of the Year from the Newhouse graduating class of 2017.

Civic Media Insights: Burcu Baykurt, “The City as Data Machine: Local Governance in the Age of Big Data”
2021-02-26 12:00 - 13:00 | MA
Beginning in 2015, city officials and civic leaders in Kansas City, Missouri partnered with Google, Cisco, and Sprint to design a smart city. This talk explains what happened next. Smart city enthusiasts predicted that a data-driven city could narrow the stark class and racial divides. In practice, city officials and civic entrepreneurs used big data to hunt for new problems or discover connections they did not know existed rather than working on extant issues. In so doing, they ignored the needs of already-vulnerable groups, downplayed their legitimate concerns about automated surveillance, and neglected the “data deserts” that they had created.

The talk will conclude by raising some larger issues about remaking cities using the techniques of data capitalism and attempts to build a model smart city to be replicated internationally.

Burcu Baykurt is an assistant professor of urban futures and communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Civic Media Insights: Rachel Kuo, “Movement Media: Racial Solidarities Across Platforms”
2021-03-04 12:00 - 13:00 | MA
Looking at processes behind media-making and information sharing, this talk demonstrates ways that racial justice movements create and sustain connections across incommensurable and uneven racial differences. As a collective site for political work, movement media make up a broad array of internal and external information produced and circulated by and within social movements for organizing purposes–from meeting agendas and text threads to social media posts and public statement letters.

Speaker Rachel Kuo brings archival materials from women of color organizing in the 1970s alongside interviews with present-day organizers to trace tenuous pursuits of solidarity and address the possibilities and challenges in building movements for the long-haul in today’s digital landscape.

Dr. Rachel Kuo studies race, technology, and social movements. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life and School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies; and co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

Beyza Boyacioglu and Jeff Soyk, “Zeki Müren Hotline - Mobile Experience”
2021-03-04 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Zeki Müren Hotline started as a simple hotline in 2015, collecting everyday people’s messages to Zeki Müren — Turkey’s most beloved and equally controversial pop star. An homage to the intimacy Müren established with his fans and a throwback to the 1990’s hotline phenomenon, this participatory project quickly became a sensation in Turkey. During the few months it was active, the hotline received hundreds of messages, often expressing nostalgia for the deceased icon and Turkey’s bygone days. The Zeki Müren Hotline mobile experience is an interactive web app* that presents a selection from those messages alongside vignettes from Müren’s life and legacy.

*Please come prepared with a charged mobile device (phone or tablet) and headphones.

Beyza Boyacioglu (Director) is a filmmaker and editor from Istanbul. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA Doc Fortnight, IDFA, RIDM, Morelia International Film Festival, !f Istanbul, Barbican Centre and many other venues and festivals. She received fellowships from Chicken & Egg, Flaherty Seminar, Greenhouse/Close Up, UnionDocs and is a Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective member. Her editing credits include In Search of Bengali Harlem by Vivek Bald and Black Lives Matter: A Global Reckoning: Italy by Vice News. She holds an MSc in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a BA in Visual Arts from Sabanci University.

Jeff Soyk (Director) is an award-winning media artist with experience in creative direction, UX design, UI design, HTML5/CSS3/JS, and film/video. His credits include creative director and UI/UX designer on PBS Frontline’s Inheritance (2016 News & Documentary EMMY winner and Peabody-Facebook Award winner) as well as art director, UI/UX designer and architect on Hollow (2013 Peabody Award winner and News & Documentary EMMY nominee).

Civic Media Insights: Rogelio Alejandro Lopez, “Rebels with a Cause: Youth, Social Movements, and Media”
2021-03-05 12:00 - 13:00 | MA
Student walkouts against gun violence in support of March for Our Lives in 2018. Mass youth mobilizations across the US and abroad for environmental justice as part of the Global Climate Strike in 2019. Continued Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice, many organized by young people, during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. This talk takes a look at youth, social movements, and media and cultural production in recent years.

Using a mixed-methods, and multi-framework approach — social movements and participatory politics — Lopez examines notable instances of youth protest and contextualizes them within broader movements to center and prioritize generational and intersectional social justice claims and grievances. Lopez also focuses on the ways youth media and cultural production cultivate a civic imagination — “the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions” — which highlights youth civic agency and collective power to change the world. Taking Alicia Garza’s words to heart “hashtags do not start movements—people do,” Lopez aims to reconcile a focus on the relevance of media and communication tools in the social justice efforts of youth alongside unchecked power among tech companies, misinformation, partisan media, and counter-movements. This talk highlights the potential of media tactics to empower youth, while also critically examining the replication of systems of oppression in a broader media ecology. In short: what remains of the liberatory potential of ICTs for young people in the US and around the world?

Rogelio Alejandro Lopez (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where his work centers on social movements, civic media, and youth culture. His dissertation is a comparative look into the use of media tactics and cultural production among youth in contemporary social movements to cultivate “civic imagination.”

Civic Media Insights: Jabari Evans, “The Anatomy of Digital Clout(chasing): Examining Social Media Visibility, Relational Labor and Empowerment Strategies of Black Youth in Chicago’s Drill Rap Scene”
2021-03-11 12:00 - 13:00 | MA
Prior literature has suggested that it is through popular music that the social, professional and technological aspirations of Black youth often come together. Nowhere is this more evident than in the context of Hip-Hop music, where Black youth inventiveness with digital tools is celebrated and valued far more than any other genre of media entertainment. Though many scholars have theorized on the centrality of individual authenticity, sexuality and masculinity to the communication of Hip-Hop artists in digital spaces, academic work has paid very little attention to artist perspectives of how their relational and visibility labor helps them cultivate neighborhood respectability and build community with like minded peers.

Using interviews and participant observation of Drill rap artists, speaker Jabari Evans explores the content and character of their work on social media toward acquiring “clout”- a digital form of influence rooted in Hip-Hop that allows marginalized youth to leverage digital tools in building social status, maintain authenticity, cultivate connections with fans, community among friends and other cultural producers. Ultimately, Evans argues Chicago’s Drill rap scene provides an example of why formal institutions need to rethink how race, class, gender and geography influence the barriers to civic action for Black youth and how their digital practices add significantly to the understanding of the counterpublics arising from social media.

Jabari Evans is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and a research fellow at the Northwestern Center of Media and Human Development. As a media scholar, his research focuses on the digital subcultures that urban youth and young adults of color develop and inhabit to understand social justice, their living environments, emotional development and professional aspirations.

Joshua Littenberg-Tobias, “Measuring Equity-Promoting Behaviors in Digital Teaching Simulations: A Topic Modeling Approach”
2021-03-11 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Digital simulations offer learning opportunities to engage and reflect on systemic issues of racism and structural violence against communities of color. This talk examines how natural language processing tools can be used to better understand participants’ experiences within simulated environments focused on anti-racist teaching and identify changes in participants’ behavior over time. As K-12 schools increasingly reckon with our country’s long history of racist teaching practices, digital simulations may provide ways to help teachers name, re-examine, and reflect on their own practice and move toward anti-racist teaching.

Dr. Joshua Littenberg-Tobias is a Research Scientist in the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. His research focuses on measuring and supporting learning within large-scale technology-mediated environments with a focus on civic engagement and anti-racist teaching practices. He received his Ph.D. from Boston College in 2015 in educational research, measurement, and evaluation.

Civic Media Insights: Sulafa Zidani, “‘Speaking in Memes’: The Linguistic and Creative Politics of the Untranslatable Public”
2021-03-12 12:00 - 13:00 | MA
Speaker Sulafa Zidani examines the transnational power dynamics within the creative practices of online publics. Through an analysis of meme production and circulation among global linguistic contexts (Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, French, and English), her work theorizes how incommensurabilities across digital vernaculars manifest into what she calls the “untranslatable public”: online communities that are constituted through their itinerancy between different languages, thus producing myriad forms of illegibility and misunderstanding.

By centering untranslatability as itself a creative and civic practice, this study reveals how meme makers enact forms of agency through the communities and discourses in which they participate, critique, or refuse altogether.

Sulafa Zidani is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California, where she studies global creative practices in digital civic engagement. She is author of various journal articles, and the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, the Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics, and Resistance Online (Peter Lang Digital Editions Series).

Discuss “The Infiltrators” with director Alex Rivera
2021-03-18 17:30 - 19:00 | MA
Alex Rivera is a filmmaker who has been telling new, urgent, and visually adventurous Latino stories for more than twenty years. His first feature film, Sleep Dealer, won multiple awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival. Rivera’s second feature film, a documentary/scripted hybrid, The Infiltrators, won both the Audience Award and the Innovators Award in the NEXT section of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, Best Documentary Feature at the Blackstar Film Festival, and is currently being developed as a scripted series by Blumhouse Television. Rivera’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Creative Capital, and many others. Alex studied at Hampshire College, was the Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and is currently a distinguished lecturer of media studies at Queens College.

About The Infiltrators

The Infiltrators is available on many platforms, including Amazon and theinfiltratorsfilm.com.

Without warning, Claudio Rojas is detained by ICE officials outside his Florida home. He is transferred to the Broward Transitional Center, a detention facility used as a holding space for imminent deportations. Terrified of never seeing him again, Claudio’s family contacts the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), a group of activist Dreamers known for stopping deportations. Believing that no one is free as long as one is in detention, NIYA enlists Marco Saavedra to self-deport with the hopes of gaining access to the detention center and impeding Claudio’s expulsion. Once inside, Marco discovers a complex for-profit institution housing hundreds of multinational immigrants, all imprisoned without trial.

Directors Cristina Ibarra (in her Sundance debut) and Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer, 2008 Sundance Film Festival) design a hybrid cinematic language, combining familiar documentary form and scripted narrative to map an uncharted domain: inside an Obama-era immigration detention system. Based on true events, The Infiltrators is both a suspenseful account of a high-stakes mission and an emotionally charged portrait of visionary youth fighting for their community.

Lisa Nakamura, “Women of Color and the Digital Labor of Repair”
2021-04-01 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
This paper traces the history of women of color labor creating the material infrastructure for digital media, moving from the sixties to the present day to demonstrate why and how this gendered and racialized labor has been devalued and made invisible. Their work maintaining and creating digital networks has traditionally been defined as menial, thereby extracting it of its status, standing, and cultural and economic value. The refusal to define this work as “real” work set the stage for our contemporary moment’s hostility against women of color’s work witnessing and documenting racism online and moderating digital environments. While paid content moderation deploys underpaid women and people of color (Roberts, 2019), when these same people report user violations relating to race and gender to social media platforms they are far more likely to be banned or suspended than other users (Gillespie, 2018). This paper analyzes two social media campaigns by young women of color to demonstrate how they envision and enact the labor of digital repair.

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Digital Studies Institute and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books on race, gender, and the Internet, most recently Racist Zoombombing (Routledge, 2021, co-authored with Hanah Stiverson and Kyle Lindsey) and Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2020, as Precarity Lab).

James Wynn, “There’s No Place Like Home: Promotional Narratives, Science Fiction, and the Case for Mars Colonization”
2021-04-08 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Given the enormous impact that colonialism has had, and continues to have, in the United States, scholars frequently look to our colonial past to understand the American present. This focus on the past, though valuable, has discouraged attention to newly emerging colonial enterprises. Perhaps one of the more conspicuous neo-colonial projects has been the push towards planting human colonies on Mars. In James Wynn’s talk, he will explore one of the many problems addressed by the rhetoric of this current colonial moment: How do you persuade people to leave their indigenous communities to start new ones in a foreign and sometimes hostile place? To explore the current rhetorical solutions to this problem, Wynn will assess the strategies used by science fiction writers to help audiences imagine life and human settlement on Mars. By comparing their efforts to lure people to the red planet with the “promotional literature” created by supporters of the English colonization of North America in the early modern period, he will show that though these colonial enterprises face similar rhetorical challenges, the material-historical contexts in which they occur significantly influence the available means for addressing them.

James Wynn is Associate Professor of English and Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching explore science, mathematics, and public policy from a rhetorical perspective. His first book Evolution by the Numbers (2012) examines how mathematics was argued into the study of variation, evolution, and heredity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most recent monograph Citizen Science in the Digital Age explores how the Internet and Internet-connected devices are reshaping the landscapes of argument occupied by scientists, lay persons, and governments. Currently, he is awaiting the publication of Arguing with Numbers, a collection of essays co-edited with G. Mitchell Reyes whose contributors investigate the relationship between rhetoric and mathematics. He is also working on a new book project on the rhetoric of Mars colonization.Professor Wynn teaches classes in Rhetoric of Science, Rhetoric and Public Policy, Climate Change, Argumentation, and Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing.

2021 CMS Graduate Thesis Presentations
2021-04-16 10:00 - 16:00 | MA
Join our graduate students as they present their Master’s theses to the public.

April 16, 202110am-12, 12:30-4Register here, and the Zoom link will be sent to you

Presentation order:

10am Roya Moussapour, “Cashing in on Student Data: Standardized Testing and Predatory College Marketing in the United States”

10:45 Kelly Wagman, “Sex, Power, and Technology: A Relational Engineering Ethos as Feminist Utopia”11:30 Elon Justice, “Hillbilly Talkback: Co-Creation and Counter-Narrative in Appalachia”Lunch Break1:00 Andrea Kim, “The Myth of Post-Racial Avatars : Techno-Orientalist Systems and Remediated Bodies in VRChat”

1:45 Will Freudenheim, “The Network and the Classroom: A History of Hypermedia Learning Environments”

2:30 Diego Cerna Aragon, “Disputing facts, disputing the economy: Media controversies at the decline of the Peruvian Miracle”

3:15 Mike Sugarman, “Playing It By Ear: Improvisation and Music Livestreaming during COVID-19”

Jonathan Sterne, “Diminished Vocalities: On Prostheses and Abilities”
2021-04-22 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
In this talk, Jonathan Sterne provides a brief overview of some of the themes of his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, December 2021) and a deeper dive into the approach to the voice he develops therein. Impairments are usually understood as the physical or biological substrates of culturally produced disabilities, but in the book, Sterne considers them as a political and theoretical problem in their own right. Impaired voices present a particularly interesting problem. Most discussions of the voice frame it as a human faculty that is connected to self and agency, as when we say that a political group “has a voice,” or when the tone of voice is taken as expressing a speaker’s inner meaning or selfhood. But how to understand voices that are produced prosthetically? In this talk Sterne will consider his own experiments with vocal prostheses alongside projects and practices that locate voice outside the human body, and that question its connection to agency. He concludes with some reflections on the capture of voices by corporations like Otter.ai in their contract with Zoom. Bonus for those who like their talks to be “meta”: this will be a talk on Zoom that will theorize the condition of talking on Zoom.

Jonathan Sterne (sterneworks.org) teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, 2021); MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota, 2016). With co-author Mara Mills, he is working on Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed, and he has a new project cooking on artificial intelligence and culture.

‘Healing’ Anime in a Pandemic
2021-05-10 16:00 | MA

Sandra Rodriguez, “Creating and Interacting with Virtual Entities: Combining VR and AI to Reflect on Human Experiences”
2021-05-20 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Drawing from recent creative experiences Chomsky vs Chomsky (Sundance 2021) and Future Rites (Creative XR, UK-Can Immersive Exchange, Philharmonia, IDFA DocLab Forum), Director Sandra Rodriguez (Canada) explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and human creativity meet at a crucial junction, to create compelling virtual worlds and characters that invite interaction, discovery and play. Between technology and carefully crafted storytelling, it is the human imagination that remains at the core of any immersion.

Sandra Rodriguez, Ph.D., is a creative director (interactive, VR, XR, AI), producer and a sociologist of new media technology. For the last four years, she was founder and head of the Creative Reality Lab at EyeSteelFilm (Emmy-award company based in Montreal), where she explored futures of non-fiction storytelling in VR/AR/AI. Her work as creative director and producer (DoNotTrack, DeprogrammedVR, Big Picture, ManicVR, Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter) have garnered multiple awards, including a Peabody (DoNotTrack, 2016), best immersive experience (IDFA DocLab 2016; Leipzig DokNeuland 2018, Numix 2018), best storytelling (UNVR and World Economic Forum tour 2018), and the first Golden Nica award given to a VR project at Ars Electronica (2019).

Her most recent works span from immersive dance performance, multi-user XR theater and large scale installation, but always explore the sparks that fly at the crossroads of AI, VR, and human creativity. Rodriguez is also a lecturer at the MIT CMS/W since 2017, where she leads the course HackingXR, MIT’s first course on VR and immersive media production. Her experience combines immersive know-how, award-winning productions and human-centered design.

Sulafa Zidani, “Messy on the Inside: Internet Memes as Mapping Tools of Everyday Life”
2021-09-23 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Attending in person: If you are not an MIT community member enrolled in MIT Covid Pass, you must register for this event at least 24 hours in advance. Email cms@mit.edu with your phone number and email address to register. You will not be able to enter the building without prior registration.

Streaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

With the proliferation of social media, internet memes have become a ubiquitous part of everyday communication. However, the power of memes cannot be fully understood without considering their role in the complex relationship between technology, space, and politics. This talk will conceptualize memes as cultural mapping tools—tools that chart out the cultural hierarchies in relation to spatial and political relations for their makers and users. Focusing on memes made by Palestinians in mixed cities, new Comparative Media Studies/Writing faculty member Sulafa Zidani will explore how memes function both in navigating the contested cultural and spatial politics and carving out space in the cultural landscape for youths’ aspirations. She concludes by discussing what we can learn from the absences in the memes, and how using memes as mapping tools can help us understand the cultural and political landscape in which meme makers operate.

As a scholar of digital culture, Sulafa Zidani writes on global creative practices in online civic engagement across geopolitical contexts and languages such as Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. She has published on online culture mixing, Arab and Chinese media politics, and critical transnational pedagogy in venues such as Social Media + Society; Asian Communication Research; Media, Culture & Society; International Journal of Communication, and others. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Resistance Online. Outside of the academy, Zidani is an accomplished public educator. As a facilitator for the Seachange Collective, she has led workshops on antiracism and social justice for organizations such as NowThis, Gimlet Media, The Onion, and The Writers Guild of America. Her public writing on popular culture and politics has appeared in Arabic and Anglophone publications.
