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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210305T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210305T130000
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SUMMARY:Civic Media Insights: Rogelio Alejandro Lopez\, “Rebels with a Cause: Youth\, Social Movements\, and Media”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\nUsing 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? \n\n\n\nRogelio 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.” 
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/civic-media-insights-rogelio-alejandro-lopez-youth-social-movements-media/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Civic Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Rogelio-Lopez-scaled.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210311T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210311T130000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210222T140644Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210222T173905Z
UID:37169-1615464000-1615467600@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY: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”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\n 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. \n\n\n\nJabari 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.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/civic-media-insights-jabari-evans-clout-chasing-chicago-drill-rap/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Civic Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Jabari-Evans.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210311T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210311T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210305T144520Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210305T150409Z
UID:37237-1615482000-1615487400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Joshua Littenberg-Tobias\, “Measuring Equity-Promoting Behaviors in Digital Teaching Simulations: A Topic Modeling Approach”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\nDr. 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.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/joshua-littenberg-tobias-measuring-equity-promoting-behaviors/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Joshua-Littenberg-Tobias.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210312T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210312T130000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210222T173028Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210222T204639Z
UID:37193-1615550400-1615554000@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Civic Media Insights: Sulafa Zidani\, “‘Speaking in Memes’: The Linguistic and Creative Politics of the Untranslatable Public”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\nBy 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. \n\n\n\nSulafa 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).
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/civic-media-insights-sulafa-zidani-speaking-memes-linguistic-creative-politics-untranslatable-public/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Civic Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Sulafa-Zidani-scaled.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210318T173000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210318T190000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210317T120937Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210318T111951Z
UID:37251-1616088600-1616094000@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Discuss “The Infiltrators” with director Alex Rivera
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\nAbout The Infiltrators\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Infiltrators is available on many platforms\, including Amazon and theinfiltratorsfilm.com.\n\n\n\n\nWithout 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. \n\n\n\nDirectors 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.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/the-infiltrators-alex-rivera/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/The-Infiltrators-poster-square.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210401T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210401T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210330T163635Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210330T165835Z
UID:37291-1617296400-1617301800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Lisa Nakamura\, “Women of Color and the Digital Labor of Repair”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\nLisa 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).
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/lisa-nakamura-women-of-color-digital-labor-of-repair/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Lisa-Nakamura-square.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210408T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210408T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210329T131533Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210329T133526Z
UID:37276-1617901200-1617906600@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:James Wynn\, “There’s No Place Like Home: Promotional Narratives\, Science Fiction\, and the Case for Mars Colonization”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\nJames 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.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/mars-colonization-james-wynn/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Concept_Mars_colony-scaled.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210416T100000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210416T160000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210317T133631Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210409T154915Z
UID:37262-1618567200-1618588800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:2021 CMS Graduate Thesis Presentations
DESCRIPTION:Join our graduate students as they present their Master’s theses to the public. \n\n\n\nApril 16\, 202110am-12\, 12:30-4Register here\, and the Zoom link will be sent to you\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\nPresentation order: \n\n\n\n10am Roya Moussapour\, “Cashing in on Student Data: Standardized Testing and Predatory College Marketing in the United States” \n\n\n\n10:45 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” \n\n\n\n1:45 Will  Freudenheim\, “The Network and the Classroom: A History of Hypermedia Learning Environments” \n\n\n\n2:30 Diego Cerna Aragon\, “Disputing facts\, disputing the economy: Media controversies at the decline of the Peruvian Miracle” \n\n\n\n3:15 Mike Sugarman\, “Playing It By Ear: Improvisation and Music Livestreaming during COVID-19”
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/cms-graduate-thesis-presentations-2021/
LOCATION:MA
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Thesis-presentation.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210422T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210422T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210405T124520Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210405T124523Z
UID:37310-1619110800-1619116200@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Jonathan Sterne\, “Diminished Vocalities: On Prostheses and Abilities”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\nJonathan 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.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/jonathan-sterne-diminished-vocalities-prostheses-abilities/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Jonathan-Sterne.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210510T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210510T160000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210319T133107Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210422T163547Z
UID:37268-1620662400-1620662400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:‘Healing’ Anime in a Pandemic
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/healing-anime-in-a-pandemic/
LOCATION:MA
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/A-Whisker-Away-poster.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210520T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210520T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210512T152015Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210519T171448Z
UID:37371-1621530000-1621535400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Sandra Rodriguez\, “Creating and Interacting with Virtual Entities: Combining VR and AI to Reflect on Human Experiences”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\n\nSandra 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). \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHer 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.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/sandra-rodriguez-combining-vr-and-ai-human-experiences/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Sandra-Rodriguez.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210923T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210923T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210907T190528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210915T145701Z
UID:37562-1632416400-1632421800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Sulafa Zidani\, “Messy on the Inside: Internet Memes as Mapping Tools of Everyday Life”
DESCRIPTION: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. \n\n\n\nStreaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWith 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. \n\n\n\n\nAs 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.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/sulafa-zidani-internet-meme-mapping-tools/
LOCATION:MIT Building 56\, Room 114\, Access via 21 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Sulafa-Zidani-square.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210930T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210930T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210824T135528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210929T164525Z
UID:37508-1633021200-1633026600@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Victoria Cain\, “Educated Viewers: Civic Spectatorship\, Media Literacy\, and American Schools”
DESCRIPTION:In-person attendance: Only MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass may attend in-person. Your MIT ID will be scanned when you arrive. \n\n\n\nStreaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this talk\, Victoria Cain provides a brief overview of some of the themes of her new book\, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History\, and a deeper dive into a few defining experiments with educational media in twentieth century US schools. Her talk will focus on the struggle of successive generations of education reformers who attempted to meet massive social and economic crises through careful instruction in media viewing and collective discussion. Cain will consider how and why these reformers came to conclude that “civic spectatorship” was essential to modern education and democratic participation\, and reflect on the significance of their experiments for schools today.  \n\n\n\n\nVictoria Cain teaches in the Department of History at Northeastern University. She is the author of Schools and Screens: A Watchful History (MIT\, 2021)\, as well as numerous articles and chapters on media\, technology and education\, and the co-author\, with Karen Rader\, of Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History (Chicago\, 2014). Her newest project explores the history and politics of adolescent privacy.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/victoria-cain-educated-viewers-civic-spectatorship-american-schools/
LOCATION:Zoom\, and (for MIT only) E15-318 Common Area\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, Massachusetts\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Victoria-Cain-square.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211007T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211007T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210917T151838Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210925T134542Z
UID:37584-1633626000-1633631400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:CMS Alumni Panel (closed session)
DESCRIPTION:For current CMS grad students only. Guest alums include Eduardo Marisca\, Mariel García Montes\, Evan Higgins\, and Lilia Kilburn. Hosted by Prof. Heather Hendershot.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/cms-alumni-panel-closed-session/
LOCATION:MIT Building E15\, Room 318 (Common Area)\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211014T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211014T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20210823T200429Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210925T134540Z
UID:37496-1634230800-1634236200@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Nick Thurston\, “Document Practices: The Art of Propagating Access”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\nThis talk will introduce arguments and examples from Nick Thurston’s current book project\, Document Practices\, which explores aesthetic and political frameworks for analyzing acts of re-publishing already public documents. With case studies that range from shadow libraries to experimental videos\, and ideas about “the document” which haunt the sociology of literature as much as documentary arts practice\, Nick will sketch out the project’s starting points and some of its key debates.  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDocuments remain the primary media form of public information and record\, so the social and epistemological status of “the document” should be central to a spectrum of debates\, from data literacy norms to intellectual property claims. Yet\, as buzz terms like “post-truth” and “deep fake” remind us\, the social lives of documents are entwined with the techno-political conditions of the communities who produce\, save and share them. As such\, the status of any document and its content are both contextually variable. Since the 1970s\, as a response to the suppression of marginalized histories and the rise of personal computing\, radical practitioners from across the arts have shifted from representing “the document” as a symbol of power to critically (and sometimes illegally) re-publishing documents as an artistic act. \n\n\n\nWith this macro picture in mind\, Nick’s project takes the micro perspective of art criticism to figure out some comparative frameworks for thinking across media and across artforms about the public-ness of publishing. \n\n\n\n\nThese preliminaries settled\, he did not care to put off any longer the execution of his design\, urged on to it by the thought of all the world was losing by his delay\, seeing what wrongs he intended to right\, grievances to redress\, injustices to repair\, abuses to remove\, and duties to discharge. \n\n\n\nAbout Nick Thurston\n\n\n\nNick Thurston is a writer and editor who makes artworks. He is the author of two experimental books\, Reading the Remove of Literature (2006) and Of the Subcontract (2013)\, the latter of which has been translated into Dutch (2016)\, Spanish (2019) and German (2020). He writes regularly for the literary and arts press as well as for independent and academic publications. His most recent book is the co-edited collection Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right (2018). His recent exhibitions include shows at Transmediale (Berlin\, 2018)\, Q21 (Vienna\, 2018)\, MuHKA (Antwerp\, 2018) and HMKV (Dortmund\, 2019).  \n\n\n\n\nFrom 2006–18 he was a co-editor of the influential publishing collective Information As Material (York)\, with whom he was Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery (London\, 2011–12). He has been Artist in Residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin\, 2014) and was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2020). He is currently Associate Professor in Fine Art at the University of Leeds\, where he co-founded the Artists’ Writings & Publications Research Centre and is a fellow of the Poetry Centre.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/nick-thurston-document-practices-the-art-of-propagating-access/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Nick-Thurston-Photo-by-Jules-Lister.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211021T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211021T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20211006T135725Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211019T121815Z
UID:37633-1634835600-1634841000@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Memorial Colloquium for Professor Jing Wang
DESCRIPTION:Attending in person: Attendance limited to MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass. Please bring your MIT ID. \n\n\n\nStreaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nProfessor Jing Wang — a beloved longtime colleague\, vocal supporter of Comparative Media Studies/Writing\, and mentor to countless students and fellow faculty — passed away at age 71 this past July. At this Colloquium\, we publicly honor her life and work\, featuring brief talks by some of those who knew her best. They include: \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmma J. Teng\, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations in MIT History and the Director of Global Languages. She teaches classes in Chinese culture\, Chinese migration history\, Asian American history\, East Asian culture\, and women’s and gender studies. Teng was Wang’s close colleague in Chinese studies for two decades. \n\n\n\nT.L. Taylor\, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and co-founder of AnyKey\, an organization dedicated to diversity and inclusion in gaming. She is a qualitative sociologist whose research explores the interrelations between culture and technology in online environments. She was a colleague to Wang\, working with her on various department-related issues\, but mostly counted her as a dear friend.  \n\n\n\nHan Su\, S.M. CMS\, ’20\, is Founder & CEO of Privoce\, which builds tools to help netizens take better control of their data. Jing Wang served as advisor on his thesis Theory and Practice Towards a Decentralized Internet. \n\n\n\nTani Barlow\, George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities at Rice University\, who met Wang in 1986 at Duke University\, where Barlow came to her first academic conference.  Over the next 45 years\, Wang and Barlow were close friends\, sisters\, comrades.  “We saw each other through joy\, success\, battles\, losses\, tragedies and the tedium and labor of writing\,” Barlow writes.  She is the author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (2004) and In the Event of Women (2021)\, as well as many edited volumes.  She is the founding senior academic editor of positions: asia critique.  Jing Wang was a founding member of the journal.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/memorial-colloquium-for-professor-jing-wang/
LOCATION:MIT Building 56\, Room 114\, Access via 21 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Jing-Wang-3x2-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211028T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211028T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20211015T144140Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211021T154238Z
UID:37662-1635440400-1635445800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Edward Schiappa\, “The Transgender Exigency: The Role of Media Representation”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis presentation defines the phrase “transgender exigency” as a situation marked by an urgent need; in this case\, the need to address the political and definitional challenges evinced by the need for transgender rights. The presentation provides evidence for substantial prejudice against transgender people\, as well as the dramatic increase in transgender visibility and rights in the 2010s. The collision of prejudice and visibility has led to a series of controversies that involve “regulatory definitions” imposed by institutions or legislatures\, some of which are the subject of Schiappa’s forthcoming book\, The Transgender Exigency: Defining Sex & Gender in the 21st Century.  \n\n\n\n\nEdward Schiappa is the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work in rhetorical theory and media studies has been published in journals in Classics\, Psychology\, Philosophy\, English\, Law\, and Communication Studies. He is author of a number of books\, including Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaningand Beyond Representational Correctness: Rethinking Criticism of Popular Media.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/edward-schiappa-the-transgender-exigency-the-role-of-media-representation/
LOCATION:Streamed live on Zoom
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Edward-Schiappa.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211104T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211104T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20211101T193332Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211101T193519Z
UID:37713-1636045200-1636050600@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Graphic Materiality\, Trauma\, and Expressionist Comics: Artist's Talk With Leela Corman
DESCRIPTION:In-person attendance: Only MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass may attend in-person. Your MIT ID will be scanned when you arrive. \n\n\n\nStreaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJoin graphic novel creator Leela Corman for a talk and Q&A about her graphic novels and short comics on the topics of generational and personal trauma\, New York City history\, Polish-Jewish life\, and amateur women’s wrestling. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCorman is a painter\, educator\, and graphic novel creator. Her books include Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon\, 2012) and the short comics collection We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet\, 2016). She is currently at work on the graphic novel Victory Parade\, a story about WWII\, women’s wrestling\, and the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Her short comics have appeared in The Believer Magazine\, Tablet Magazine\, Nautilus\, and The Nib.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/graphic-materiality-trauma-expressionist-leela-corman/
LOCATION:Zoom\, and (for MIT only) E15-318 Common Area\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, Massachusetts\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Leela-Corman.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211118T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211118T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20211018T201531Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211119T150851Z
UID:37667-1637254800-1637260200@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Craig Robertson\, “‘Information at Your Fingertips’: The Filing Cabinet and the Gendering of Information Work”
DESCRIPTION:Attending in person: Attendance limited to MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass. Please bring your MIT ID. \n\n\n\nStreaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this talk\, Craig Robertson provides a brief overview of the some of the themes of his recent book\, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minnesota\, 2021). He argues the emergence of the filing cabinet illustrates an important moment in the genealogy of the ascendance of modern information. He highlights a moment when information became a label for an instrumental form of knowledge\, as information is connected to gendered ideas of efficiency and labor. Storing loose sheets of paper on their long edge in tabbed manila folders grouped behind tabbed guide cards made visible and tangible a conception of information as a discrete unit. Compared to pages in a bound book\, loose paper in a tabbed folder presented information as something that was discrete\, easy to extract\, and easy to circulate: it was now possible to have information at your fingertips.  \n\n\n\n\nCraig Robertson is an associate professor of media studies at Northeastern University. For the last decade he has been researching and writing on the history of information and paperwork beginning with The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford\, 2010) His most recent book is The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minnesota\, 2021).
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/craig-robertson-filing-cabinet-gendering-information-work/
LOCATION:MIT Building E15\, Room 318 (Common Area) and streamed on Zoom\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, 02139
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Craig-Robertson.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211202T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211202T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20211118T161604Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211202T220056Z
UID:37758-1638464400-1638469800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Ekene Ijeoma\, “Poetic Justice: Art at the same scale society has the capacity to destroy”
DESCRIPTION:Attending in person: Attendance limited to MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass. Please bring your MIT ID. \n\n\n\nStreaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038). \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFounded in the spring of 2019 by artist Ekene Ijeoma\, Poetic Justice researches intersectional issues\, such as racial and environmental justice\, and develops artworks about or with communities. Poetic Justice’s participatory public artworks\, including phone and online accessible sound and video streams\, have been presented by the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston\, Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis\, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art\, and Museum of the City of New York. \n\n\n\n\nIts current projects question\, if “Artists need to create on the same scale as society has the capacity to destroy\,” as Sherrie Rabinowitz suggested in 1984\, then how can we scale social practice through conceptual art and computational design strategies? Ijeoma will share how Poetic Justice has been thinking through this question by developing a series of generative sound and video portraits of linguistic and ethnic diversity in US cities\, Black thought and expression in the US (TBA)\, liberty and equality across multiple countries (TBA)\, and Black lives lost to COVID-19 in the US (TBA). \n\n\n\nEkene Ijeoma is an artist\, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT\, and Director of the Poetic Justice group at MIT Media Lab. Through his lab and studio art practices\, Ijeoma researches social inequality across multiple fields to develop communal empathy through sound\, video\, sculpture\, and installation art. Ijeoma’s multimedia practices critique themes such as language\, identity\, and displacement\, and propose values such as belonging and healing. His work has been presented through exhibitions and initiatives at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art\, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver\, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston\, Annenberg Space for Photography and The Kennedy Center. 
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/ekene-ijeoma-poetic-justice/
LOCATION:Zoom\, and (for MIT only) E15-318 Common Area\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, Massachusetts\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Ekene-Ijeoma-photo-by-Kris-Graves.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20211209T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20211209T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20211117T200821Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211117T202040Z
UID:37741-1639069200-1639074600@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Alexandra To\, “Uplifting Us: Design Opportunities in Centering Racialized Experiences in Games”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople of color have always been present in games as designers\, developers\, players\, and critics. As Kishonna Gray further expounds\, gaming is a site for “resistance\, activism\, and mobilization among marginalized users.” In this talk Alexandra To will describe some of the game design opportunities present in centering the experiences of people of color from the beginning through the lens of 1) a design process that focuses on the creation of joyful counterspaces\, 2) game design choices that embed encountering and processing racial trauma\, and 3) exploring the work that players of color are actively engaging in to create custom content that represents them where it may not exist. Through these projects we can begin to articulate an agenda for racially inclusive game design. \n\n\n\n\nAlexandra To is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University jointly appointed in the Art + Design (Games) department in the College of Art\, Media\, and Design and the Khoury College of Computer Science. Her core research interests are in studying and designing social technologies to empower people in marginalized contexts. She uses qualitative methods to gather counterstories and participatory methods to design for the future. She additionally has extensive experience leading teams of educational game designers and has designed award-winning games. She has received multiple ACM Best Paper awards and published at CHI\, UIST\, CSCW\, CHI Play\, ToDiGRA\, and DIS. Alexandra is a racial justice activist\, a critical race scholar\, game designer. She received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University as well as a B.S. and M.S. in Symbolic Systems with a minor in Asian American Studies from Stanford University.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/alexandra-to-design-opportunities-racialized-experiences-games/
LOCATION:Streamed live on Zoom
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Alexandra-To-scaled.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220203T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220203T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20211116T173954Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220126T194606Z
UID:37746-1643907600-1643913000@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Samantha N. Sheppard\, “Changing the Subject: Lynn Nottage’s By the Way\, Meet Vera Stark and the Making of Black Women’s Film History”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLynn Nottage’s 2011 satirical play By the Way\, Meet Vera Stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark\, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood’s golden age. Nottage\, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter\, was inspired in part by the career of African American actress\, singer\, and dancer Theresa Harris. A play about Black women’s cinematic representation and social erasure\, Nottage’s fabrication of film history extends beyond the staged plot to also include a digital archive documenting Vera’s celebrity and career. In this talk\, Samantha N. Sheppard examines how Nottage’s play and paratexts produce a speculative fiction and archive about Black women’s media histories\, staging what she calls a phantom cinema—an amalgam of real and imagined film histories that haunt\, trouble\, and work with and against cinema histories to creatively illuminate archival gaps in visual culture and the public imagination. \n\n\n\n\nSamantha N. Sheppard is an associate professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race\, Embodiment\, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press\, 2020) and co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi\, 2016) and Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press\, 2020). She has published on film and media in academic and popular venues such as Film Quarterly\, The Atlantic\, Flash Art International\, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/samantha-n-sheppard-making-black-womens-film-history/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Samantha-N.-Sheppard-scaled.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220210T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220210T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20220126T194555Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220128T160358Z
UID:37863-1644512400-1644517800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Eric Freedman\, “Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVideo game engines have promoted a new cultural economy for software production and have provided a common architecture for digital content creation across what were once distinct media verticals—film\, television\, video games and other immersive and interactive media forms that can leverage real-time 3D visualization. Game engines are the building blocks for efficient real-time visualization\, and they signal quite forcefully the colonizing influence of programming. Video game engines are powering our visual futures\, and engine developers that include Unity Technologies and Epic Games are rapidly iterating their products to tackle new markets\, where data and visuality continue to converge. This analysis\, which draws from software studies and studies of visual culture\, examines a tool that is fairly new to the Epic Games arsenal—the in-development MetaHuman Creator that is part of Epic’s proprietary Unreal Engine. The MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed application that draws from a library of real scans of people and allows 3D content developers to quickly create unique photorealistic fully-rigged digital humans. MetaHuman creation is a fluid of process\, and the speedy transformation of character rigs and other non-binary attributes highlights the potential queerness or openness of data. Yet the ongoing push toward (hyper)realism in commercial media has birthed a visual economy which is supported by an industrial apparatus that privileges mastery over the tools of production\, and where bodies and politics are often cleaved in the design process. Epic’s multiethnic\, multiracial\, transgender MetaHuman Creator is a design tool and not a narrative engine. Its transitions are simple and seamless\, and the traces of non-binary and non-white identities are simply part of a larger color palette. These tools represent a way of seeing and knowing the world\, and the representations they produce are part of hermetically-sealed and privately-held encoding processes that include a company’s original data\, its application programming\, its proprietary build environment and its interface. This analysis poses two interrelated questions. Are the MetaHuman Creator and similar simplified building tools democratizing the field of digital content creation? Are they fostering more diverse representations and narratives\, and supporting the free play of identity in playable media? \n\n\n\n\nEric Freedman is Professor and Dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author most recently of The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture (2020)\, as well as Transient Images: Personal Media in Public Frameworks (2011). He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Creative Media Research and the advisory board of the Communication and Media Studies Research Network.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/eric-freedman-non-binary-binaries-and-unreal-metahumans/
LOCATION:Streamed live on Zoom
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Eric-Freedman.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220217T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220217T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20220119T162500Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220124T210209Z
UID:37841-1645117200-1645122600@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Jorge Caraballo\, “How to Use Audio Storytelling to Cultivate a Community and Keep it Engaged”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPodcasts are in a golden age and are being used to effectively communicate new ideas\, tell compelling stories\, and build highly participative communities. This presentation will explore the power of audio storytelling to connect individuals in engaged networks of collaboration. Jorge Caraballo (’22 Harvard Nieman Fellow) will draw from experience as the former Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –Latin America’s most popular documentary podcast– and will highlight different ways in which storytelling can be the starting point of new collective identities. \n\n\n\n\nJorge Caraballo is a journalist and a 2022 Harvard Nieman fellow. Before that\, he worked for four years as the Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –the most popular documentary podcast in Spanish\, and the only one in that language distributed by NPR. There he led online and offline engagement initiatives to grow the community around the podcast. He holds a master’s degree in Media Innovation at Northeastern University. He’s a Fulbright Scholar and a Google News Initiative Fellow.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/jorge-caraballo-audio-storytelling-cultivate-community-keep-it-engaged/
LOCATION:Streamed live on Zoom
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Jorge-Caraballo-square.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220224T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220224T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20220127T132722Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220127T132724Z
UID:37867-1645722000-1645727400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Hillary Chute\, "Maus Now: Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel and the Present Tense"
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this talk\, Hillary Chute considers the contemporary relevance of Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel\, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale\, in an overview linked to her forthcoming book Maus Now: Selected Writing (a collection to be published by Pantheon in 2022). Maus was first published serially beginning in 1980\, and came out in two book volumes in 1986 and 1991; today\, she argues\, it’s timeless for many different reasons\, including stark political ones. She highlights what Spiegelman’s comics narrative\, which is about history\, reveals about the form’s capacity both to register the continuousness of history and also to function in today’s context as a text of resistance to fascism. \n\n\n\n\nHillary Chute is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. She is the author or editor of six books\, including Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (Harper\, 2017)\, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness\, Comics\, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP\, 2016)\, Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (U of Chicago P)\, and Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia UP\, 2010). She has written for venues including Artforum\, Bookforum\, the Village Voice\, and the New York Review of Books. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for the New York Times Book Review.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/hillary-chute-maus-now-spiegelmans-graphic-novel-and-the-present-tense/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Hillary-Chute-square.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220310T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220310T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20220121T143612Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220304T133039Z
UID:37850-1646931600-1646937000@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Katherine Jewell in conversation with Ian Condry\, “Party City: WMBR\, Institutional Change\, and Democratic Media”
DESCRIPTION:In-person attendance: limited to  MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass. \n\n\n\nStreaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCollege radio has long been known as the weird\, wacky signals on the left of the FM dial offering music that would never be mainstream. But this wasn’t always the case—and moreover\, even at stations exemplifying musical adventurousness and the community potential of college signals\, institutional constraints loomed. In this talk\, Katherine Jewell delves into the history of WMBR at MIT from the 1960s to the 1980s to explore how this station\, with a license held by an independent non-profit corporation\, built a meaningful community institution despite transformations within the university\, its student body and organizations\, as well as regulatory changes regarding noncommercial radio and the music industry’s shifting business model. DJs debated and embraced the democratic obligations of their signal\, particularly their commitment to diversity of sound. But achieving these lofty goals often proved complicated given the need to construct a program that appealed to and served many audiences in a fluctuating radio market. Despite these limits\, college radio’s history can offer much to consider in considering how to pursue democratic media and community connection in the twenty-first century. \n\n\n\n\nKatherine Rye Jewell\, Ph.D.\, is a historian writing about the history of college radio\, including her forthcoming book\, tentatively titled Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio from University of North Carolina Press. Her research on college radio is at the center of two additional book projects currently in progress. She is the author of Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century\, published by Cambridge University Press (New York) in 2017. Her work has appeared in The American Historian\, the Washington Post\, among other scholarly publications. A graduate of Vanderbilt University (BA\, 2001) and Boston University (MA\, 2005; Ph.D.\, 2010)\, she studies the business and politics of culture. She is currently Associate Professor of History at Fitchburg State University\, where she received the Fitchburg State University Faculty Research Award in 2018\, and a year-long visiting fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. \n\n\n\n\n\nIan Condry is a cultural anthropologist of Japan and professor at MIT since 2002. He is the author of two books\, Hip-Hop Japan and The Soul of Anime\, both of which explore globalization from below. The books are available for free\, thanks to Creative Commons and Duke University Press: mit.academia.edu/IanCondry. In the fall of 2019\, he launched the MIT Spatial Sound Lab\, a community production studio for immersive\, multiperspective\, sonic experimentation. Among the goals is to provide a space for using sound to disrupt hierarchies\, reduce inequalities\, and cross borders. He is co-organizer of Dissolve Music\, a sound conference and music festival\, in 2018 and 2020 (mitdissolve.com). Since 2018\, he is the radio DJ for Near and Far\, a Japanese hip-hop show\, on WMBR 88.1FM Cambridge\, and online at wmbr.org\, weekly Tuesdays 7-8pm. Archive at mixcloud.com/iancondry. Since 2006\, he has organized the MIT / Harvard Cool Japan research project\, which explores the critical potential of popular culture. He is currently working on a book about musicians on the margins in Tokyo\, Boston\, and Berlin.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/katherine-jewell-party-city-wmbr-institutional-change-and-democratic-media/
LOCATION:Zoom\, and (for MIT only) E15-318 Common Area\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, Massachusetts\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Katherine-Jewell-square.jpg
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220317T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220317T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20220225T153905Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220225T154014Z
UID:37909-1647536400-1647541800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Racquel Gates\, “Reintroducing Melvin Van Peebles”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this talk\, Racquel Gates presents her experience working as consulting producer on the Criterion release of Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films. \n\n\n\nA legendary filmmaker whose unique personality is just as well-known as his body of work\, Van Peebles made an indelible impact on both Black film and independent cinema. How\, then\, to present new insights on Van Peebles in a way that built on viewers’ existing familiarity with the filmmaker and his work while avoiding cliches and hagiography? In “Reintroducing Melvin Melvin Van Peebles\,” Gates considers the history of her own research on Van Peebles’s films\, and details the pleasures — and challenges — of trying to create a bridge between the worlds of academic film studies and more public facing consumer film culture.  \n\n\n\n\nRacquel Gates is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Columbia University. Her research focuses on blackness and popular culture\, with special attention to discourses of taste and quality. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke\, 2018)\, and is currently working on her second book\, titled Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness. In 2020\, she was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/racquel-gates-reintroducing-melvin-van-peebles/
LOCATION:MA
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Racquel-Gates-scaled.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220331T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220331T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20220317T190707Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220317T191212Z
UID:37947-1648746000-1648751400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Jens Pohlmann\, “Platform Regulation and the Digital Public Sphere: Comparing the Discourse in Germany and the United States”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this talk\, Jens Pohlmann compares the discourse about the regulation of social media platforms and its effect on freedom of expression in Germany and the United States. Drawing on computational methods\, he analyzes the discussion about a German anti-hate speech law called the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the debate about a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States in different media environments (IT-blogs\, newspapers\, social media). \n\n\n\nUltimately\, he considers the extent to which cultural\, historical\, and political differences between these two liberal democracies inform the present transatlantic debate about the restriction of content online and the regulation of social media platforms\, as well as potential impacts on the evolving digital public sphere. \n\n\n\n\nJens Pohlmann is a Research Associate at the Centre for Media\, Communication & Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2017 and focuses his research on the internet policy discourse in Germany and the United States. His first book\, The Creation of an Avant-Garde Brand: Heiner Müller’s Self-Presentation in the German Public Sphere is to be published this fall.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/jens-pohlmann-platform-regulation-digital-public-sphere-germany-united-states/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Portrait-Jens-Pohlmann-MIT_Website-compl.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220407T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220407T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20220308T192808Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220308T192810Z
UID:37934-1649350800-1649356200@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Oscar Winberg\, “Archie Bunker Goes to Washington: How Television in the 1970s Remade Politics into Entertainment”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis talk reconsiders the role of television entertainment in American political life in the 1970s and beyond. Focusing on the situation comedy All in the Family (CBS\, 1971-1979)\, the talk looks at a turn to politics in entertainment and a turn to entertainment in politics. In the 1970s\, fictive characters\, including Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) of All in the Family but also Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) of MAS*H and Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show\, became political icons. Produced by Norman Lear\, All in the Family is recognized as a watershed moment in television history. And yet\, Oscar Winberg argues\, the show did not just change television\, it transformed American politics. Recognizing the popularity of television\, politicians learned how to use (and abuse) television entertainment to win votes\, to fundraise\, to promote their agenda\, and to push for legislation. Television entertainment in the 1970s thereby remade political life in its image\, paving the way for our current moment of mediated showbiz politics. \n\n\n\n\nOscar Winberg holds a Ph.D. in History from Åbo Akademi University. He is working on a political history of television entertainment in the 1970s United States. His work focuses on mass media in modern political history and has appeared in PS: Political Science & Politics\, European Journal of American Studies\, and Finsk Tidskrift. He is a columnist for Hufvudstadsbladet and has written for venues such as Made by History at the Washington Post\, Vasabladet\, and the public broadcasting corporation in Finland.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/oscar-winberg-archie-bunker-goes-to-washington-how-television-in-the-1970s-remade-politics-into-entertainment/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Oscar-Winberg-1.jpg
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220414T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220414T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T172406
CREATED:20220322T141435Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220323T131201Z
UID:37962-1649955600-1649961000@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:“Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech\,” a Conversation with Martha Minow and Heather  Hendershot
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn her 2021 book Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech\, our guest Martha Minow “outlines an array of reforms\, including a new fairness doctrine\, regulating digital platforms as public utilities\, using antitrust authority to regulate the media\, policing fraud\, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses\, such reforms are not merely plausible ideas; they are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press continues to hold meaning in the twenty-first century.” \n\n\n\n\nMartha Minow has taught at Harvard Law School\, where she also served as Dean\, since 1981. In addition to Saving the News\, she is author of When Should Law Forgive? (2019)\, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Constitutional Landmark (2010)\, among many other books and articles. She is an expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women\, children\, and persons with disabilities\, she also writes and teaches about digital communications\, democracy\, privatization\, military justice\, and ethnic and religious conflict. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHeather Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and studies TV news\, conservative media\, political movements\, and American film and television history. She is author of the forthcoming book When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America\, which follows her 2016 title Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line. She has held fellowships at Vassar College\, New York University\, Princeton\, Harvard\, Radcliffe\, and Stanford\, and she has also been a Guggenheim fellow. Her courses emphasize the interplay between creative\, political\, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/saving-the-news-martha-minow-heather-hendershot/
LOCATION:MA
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Martha-Minow-1.jpg
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