Women in Science
2015-02-26 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti and energy studies expert Jessika Trancik will discuss their careers and the outlook for women in science in the 21st century. Sabeti, an associate professor at Harvard and a senior associate member of the Broad Institute, and Trancik, an assistant professor in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division, are both rising stars in the research world. They will be in discussion with Rosalind Williams, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology at MIT.

Media and Memory at the Vidéothèque de Paris
2015-03-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Catherine E. ClarkAssistant Professor, MIT Global Studies and Languages
The Vidéothèque de Paris, a moving image archive of the French capital, opened in 1988, during a period when French technological advances led the world in revolutionizing the circulation of people and information. Accordingly, the Vidéothèque would be no mere dusty archive but rather a high-tech institution of robots, computers, VCRs, and Minitels. Its organizers deployed the very latest technologies to place nearly a century of fiction films, documentaries, television programs, and advertising with Paris as their subject or setting at visitors’ disposal. Organizers promised that within a year or two the whole archive would be available in Parisian living rooms, as its collections became the basis of a Parisian on-demand cable channel.
Contemporaries imagined that these cutting-edge technologies would transform users’ very relationship to the past. They hoped to turn institutionalized history into memory, a flexible, customizable, and ultimately personal, experience of the past. The dream of an archive that replaced all others by providing constant access to cultural and social memory through cutting-edge technologies did not last more than a decade. But the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the Vidéothèque’s creation helps illuminate and call into question the utopian promises of the much more recent revolution in digital history.
MIT Global Studies and Languages assistant professor Catherine E. Clark is a cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and visual culture.
Her current book project, Paris and the Cliché of History, explores the intersection of the history of Paris and the history of photography. It tells the story of the various uses of photos as documents of the capital’s past from the establishment of Paris’s municipal historical institutions (the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris) to the amateur photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970,” which created an archive of 100,000 pictures of the city. The project combines the history of collecting photographs with a consideration of the theoretical assumptions that underpinned their use, alongside prints and paintings, in illustrated books, historical exhibitions, and commemorations.

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

The Art, Ethics and Technology of Documentary Co-Creation
2015-03-18 17:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
With the Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology:

Katerina Cizek, Documentary Director, National Film Board of Canada, and MIT Visiting Artist
Andrew Lowenthal, Open Documentary Lab Fellow and Co-Founder of EngageMedia
Mandy Rose, Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of West England, Bristol UK
Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center for Civic Media and principal research scientist at the MIT Media Lab

As new forms of media, networks and devices emerge throughout history, documentarians are always at the forefront of discovering how to tell stories with them. From the first newsreels, to the latest Virtual Reality installations, non-fiction creators are the first to introduce their audiences and users to novel ways of interacting, immersing and collaborating in new environments while interpreting reality. How can these new technologies change the documentary creator’s relationship to the “people formerly known as subjects”? How can new models of co-creation redefine not just the form of the story itself but the methods by which we create them? How can documentaries be made “with” people instead of “about” them? This panel examines the history and potential for documentarians to co-create with citizens, social scientists, technologists and performing artists, with the aim to both create artful meaning and foster concrete political action.

Sandra Gaudenzi: "From Interaction to Personalization: What Happens When We Become Part of the Story"
2015-03-19 14:00 - 15:30 | MA
It took about 15 years to accept that the documentaries of the 21st century might be “interactive”. Moving from a linear media to a non linear one has challenged the role of the author in the creative treatment of actuality – as subjects and the users are now directly involved in such creation. But a new shift is about to disturb our idea of what a narrative is: the oculus rift places us in a world that composes itself in real time while we are exploring it, and data mining allows us to personalise stories to their final users. What happens to our understanding of reality when we become the protagonists of hypothetical worlds?
Sandra Gaudenzi has started her career as a television producer. She then moved into interactive television, and has been teaching interactive media theory at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) from 1999 till 2013. She is now Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the West of England. Her research interests include interactive documentary, participatory practices, UX in i-docs, transmedia storytelling, locative experiences and games for change. Sandra is one of the conveners of i-Docs, a conference totally dedicated to interactive documentaries, that she initiated in 2011 and she is a creative director of its website, http://i-docs.org/ and Facebook group. She currently blogs at www.interactivefactual.net and is the author of www.interactivedocumentary.net, a blog that she started in 2009 in order to document her own experience of doing a PhD at Goldsmiths (University of London).

Coming of Age in Dystopia: The Darkness of Young Adult Fiction
2015-03-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Why are brutal dystopias, devastating apocalyptic visions, and tales of personal trauma such a staple of young adult literature? Kristin Cashore, author of the award-winning Graceling Realm trilogy, and the University of Florida’s Kenneth Kidd will explore the history and current preoccupations of one of the most popular forms of fiction today. Marah Gubar, an associate professor in MIT’s Literature department, will moderate.

Sandra Gaudenzi: "Digital Me Demo & Feedback Session"
2015-03-20 10:00 - 11:30 | MA
Imagine if the digital persona you have been creating all these years while socialising online wanted to speak to you. What could you discover about each other? Digital Me, an interactive documentary, is a private experience that uses personalization to make you reflect on your multiple and hybrid (digital/physical) personalities while guaranteeing you the ownership of the data that is retrieved about yourself.
Digital Me is a project by Sandra Gaudenzi and Helios Design Labs that is currently in concept development with BBC Learning.
Sandra Gaudenzi has started her career as a television producer. She then moved into interactive television, and has been teaching interactive media theory at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) from 1999 till 2013. She is now Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the West of England. Her research interests include interactive documentary, participatory practices, UX in i-docs, transmedia storytelling, locative experiences and games for change. Sandra is one of the conveners of i-Docs, a conference totally dedicated to interactive documentaries, that she initiated in 2011 and she is a creative director of its website, http://i-docs.org/ and Facebook group. She currently blogs at www.interactivefactual.net and is the author of www.interactivedocumentary.net, a blog that she started in 2009 in order to document her own experience of doing a PhD at Goldsmiths (University of London).

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

Thesis Presentations: Comparative Media Studies Graduate Class of 2015
2015-04-03 09:00 - 16:30 | MIT Student Center, Mezzanine Lounge, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, 02139, United States
This event is free and open to the public, and you may watch a live feed. You are welcome to attend as many or as few presentations as you wish.
9:00 Coffee and Conversation
9:15 Morning Presentations

Chelsea Barabas: “Mirror Mirror on the Wall: A Study of Bias and Perceptions of Merit in the High-tech Labor Market”
Desiree Gonzalez: “Museum Making: Creating with Emerging Technologies in Art Museums”
Liam Andrew: “The Missing Links: An Archaeology of Digital Journalism”
Heather Craig: “Interactive Data Storytelling: Designing for Public Engagement”
Jesse Sell: “E-sports Broadcasting Conventions”

12:30 Lunch Break
1:30 Afternoon Presentations

Sean Flynn: “Evaluating Interactive Documentaries: Audience, Impact, and Innovation in Public Interest Media”
Wang Yu: “Heike, Jike, Chuangke: Creativity in Chinese Technology Communities”
Suruchi Dumpawar: “Mediating Open Government Data: Using Data to Drive Changes in the Built Environment”
Ainsley Sutherland: “Digital Art, Immersion and Empathy: Evaluating Games and Digital Media Art for Engendering Mutual Understanding”
Erik Stayton: “Driverless Dreams: Narratives, Ideologies, and the Shape of the Automated Car”

CMS Graduate Thesis Presentations
2015-04-03 09:00 - 17:00 | MIT Student Center Mezzanine Lounge, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139
Watch live!

Thesis Presentations
of the

Comparative Media Studies Graduate Class of 2015
April 3, 2014
MIT Student Center Mezzanine Lounge
9:00 Coffee and Conversation

9:15 Presentations by:

Chelsea Barabas Mirror Mirror on the Wall: A Study of Bias and Perceptions of Merit in the High-tech Labor Market

Desiree Gonzalez Museum Making: Creating with Emerging Technologies in Art Museums

Liam Andrew The Missing Links: An Archaeology of Digital Journalism

Heather Craig Interactive Data Storytelling: Designing for Public Engagement

Jesse Sell E-sports Broadcasting Conventions

12:30 Lunch Break

1:30 Presentations by:

Sean Flynn Evaluating Interactive Documentaries: Audience, Impact, and Innovation in Public Interest Media

Wang Yu Heike, Jike, Chuangke: Creativity in Chinese Technology Communities

Suruchi Dumpawar Mediating Open Government Data: Using Data to Drive Changes in the Built Environment

Ainsley Sutherland Digital Art, Immersion and Empathy: Evaluating Games and Digital Media Art for Engendering Mutual Understanding

Erik Stayton Driverless Dreams: Narratives, Ideologies, and the Shape of the Automated Car
This event is free and open to the public. It will also be streamed live on Ustream.tv.

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

The Spooky Science of the Southern Reach: An Evening with Jeff VanderMeer
2015-04-16 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer, author of the New York Times bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), will join G. Eric Schaller, Professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth, for a broad-ranging discussion about the scientific and philosophical ideas that inspired the series. The two friends and occasional collaborators will discuss conservation science, VanderMeer’s relationship with the natural world, and the theme of extinction in “slow apocalypse” fiction, as well as the role of real-world science in science fiction. Moderator: Seth Mnookin.

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

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

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

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

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

Jane McGonigal discusses her new book "SuperBetter" with Scot Osterweil
2015-09-17 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jane McGonigal, coming to MIT September 17th and hosted by Harvard Book Store
We’re thrilled to join Harvard Book Store as they host Jane McGonigal, who will discuss her new book SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient–Powered by the Science of Games with our own Scot Ostwerweil here at MIT.
SuperBetter will be on sale here and will feature a book signing!

McGonigal’s new book will be on sale — with a book signing — at the event
Harvard Book Store welcomes internationally renowned game designer and bestselling author of Reality is Broken JANE MCGONIGAL and Creative Director of the Education Arcade SCOT OSTERWEIL for a discussion of McGonigal’s latest book, SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient—Powered by the Science of Games.
In 2009 Jane McGonigal suffered a severe concussion. Unable to think clearly or work or even get out of bed, she became anxious and depressed, even suicidal. But rather than let herself sink further, she decided to get better by doing what she does best: she turned her recovery process into a resilience-building game. What started as a simple motivational exercise quickly became a set of rules for “post-traumatic growth” that she shared on her blog. These rules led to a digital game and a major research study with the National Institutes of Health. Today nearly half a million people have played SuperBetter to get stronger, happier, and healthier.
But the life-changing ideas behind SuperBetter are much bigger than just one game. In this book, McGonigal reveals a decade’s worth of scientific research into the ways all games—including videogames, sports, and puzzles—change how we respond to stress, challenge, and pain. She explains how we can cultivate new powers of recovery and resilience in everyday life simply by adopting a more “gameful” mind-set. Being gameful means bringing the same psychological strengths we naturally display when we play games—such as optimism, creativity, courage, and determination—to real-world goals.
Drawing on hundreds of studies, McGonigal shows that getting superbetter is as simple as tapping into the three core psychological strengths that games help you build:

Your ability to control your attention, and therefore your thoughts and feelings

Your power to turn anyone into a potential ally, and to strengthen your existing relationships

Your natural capacity to motivate yourself and super-charge your heroic qualities,like willpower, compassion, and determination

SuperBetter contains nearly 100 playful challenges anyone can undertake in order to build these gameful strengths. It includes stories and data from people who have used the SuperBetter method to get stronger in the face of illness, injury, and other major setbacks, as well as to achieve goals like losing weight, running a marathon, and finding a new job.
As inspiring as it is down to earth, and grounded in rigorous research, SuperBetter is a proven game plan for a better life. You’ll never say that something is “just a game” again.

Jim Crow and the Legacy of Segregation Outside of the South
2015-09-24 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Police shootings and the Black Lives Matter campaign have shone a spotlight on how different the everyday experiences are of white Americans and Americans of color. While much attention has been paid to these seemingly daily occurrences, the historical forces that led to our current situation have been less discussed: Is the de facto segregation that exists in many Northern cities a result of the lack of forced integration of the type that took place in the South? And is the mass incarceration of and police brutality inflicted on black Americans a result of these same forces?
Melissa Nobles is the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at MIT. She is also a collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice clinic. Her current research is focused on constructing a database of racial murders in the American South between 1930 and 1954. She is the author of two books: Shades of Citizenship: Race and Census in Modern Politics (2000) and The Politics of Official Apologies (2008), and related book chapters and articles.
Tracey Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Before coming to Yale, she was the Max Pam Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago; she was the first African-American woman granted tenure at both institutions’ law schools. She’s worked extensively with the federal government, and since December 2014 she has a been a member of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the Communications Forum and the associate director of the Graduate Program of Science Writing at MIT. His most recent book is The Panic Virus: The True Story of the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

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

Dissolve Unconference: A Summit on Inequality
2015-10-08 13:30 - 16:30 | Stata Center Lawn, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Full info at mitdissolve.com. Overview…
Come join a wide-ranging discussion of inequality featuring faculty and students from MIT and Harvard.
This unconference asks: How can we dissolve the structures of power that produce today’s inequalities?
This summit will feature 10-minute ignite sessions (talk/discussion) on central topics of our time: climate change; civic media; black lives matter; gender inequality; society and economy from anthropological and humanist perspectives; community activism and co-design; affordable DIY health solutions; and more.
The final hour will focus on open discussion and networking, including art and light food. Cambridge-based Toscanini’s owner Gus Rancatore will also unveil a new ice cream flavor called “This is what democracy tastes like.”
The goal is to identify common themes and to suggest possibilities for driving systemic change. We will focus on bottom-up approaches that can circumvent or transform today’s political dysfunction and economic inequalities to move us towards a more inclusive social and economic future.
In the evening, the Dissolve participants will join with local art collective Illuminus for an immersive light and sound event, including DJ Wayne&Wax (Prof. Wayne Marshall, ethnomusicologist at Berklee College of Music) and MIT’s DJ IanC.
Speakers include anthropologists, media theorists, activists, and more, including:

Ethan Zuckerman (MIT, Center for Civic Media) rejecting politics, embracing civics
Jose Gomez-Marquez (MIT, Little Devices), affordable, DIY medical technology
Chelsea Barabas (MIT), tech jobs and diversity
Christine Walley (MIT, Anthropology), Exit Zero filmmaker, US deindustrialization
Tomiko Yoda (Harvard, EALC), gender inequality in media
Alex Zahlten (Harvard, EALC), inequality and media theory
Stefan Helmreich (MIT, Anthropology), wave culture, technology, inequality
Fossil Free MIT, climate change activism
Ed Bertschinger (MIT), Institute Community Equity Officer, diversity in higher ed
Sasha Costanza-Chock (MIT, Center for Civic Media), co-design and activism
Black Lives Matter, race and violence in the US
Ian Condry (MIT), Billionaire Action Lab Network @ MIT (baln.mit.edu)

The event is organized by the Creative Communities Initiative (ccimit.mit.edu), a lab Ian Condry co-directs with Prof. T.L. Taylor. The event is produced in collaboration with the MIT Solve Conference (solve.mit.edu) and HUBweek (hubweek.org), a celebration of technology, art, and innovation in the Cambridge / Boston area.
We also acknowledge the generous support of MIT Global Studies and Languages and the department of Comparative Media Studies / Writing.
The Dissolve team is seeking groups who would like to have designated tables for sharing information. There is no fee for use of a table, but please pre-register.
For more information, or to get involved, please contact:
Prof. Ian Condry
condry@mit.edu

From the Neolithic Era to the Apocalypse: How to Prepare for the Future by Studying the Past
2015-10-08 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
For thousands of years, humans have experienced cycles of empire building and retreat, from the neolithic settlers of Levant and the Indus Valley to the ancient Cahokia and Maya civilizations. What can new discoveries teach us about how to plan our next thousand years as a global civilization? Authors Charles C. Mann and Annalee Newitz will talk about how ancient civilizations shed light on current problems with urbanization, food security, and environmental change.
Charles C. Mann is the author, most recently, of 1493, a New York Times best-seller, and 1491, winner of the National Academies of Science’s Keck award for best book of the year. His next project, The Wizard and the Prophet, is a book about the future that makes no predictions. An early version of the introductory chapter was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.
Annalee Newitz writes science nonfiction and science fiction. She’s editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and founding editor of io9.com. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her work has appeared in publications from The New Yorker and Technology Review to 2600 and Lightspeed Magazine. Her next book is a novel about robots, pirates, and the future of property laws.

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

Syria and the Right to the Image
2015-10-19 17:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

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

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

Women in Politics: Representation and Reality
2015-11-12 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Women are chronically underrepresented in U.S. politics. Yet TV shows, fictions, and films have leapt ahead of the electoral curve to give us our first female president(s). What messages about women and power do these fictional representations of female politicians send? What connections (if any) can we draw between representation and reality? What challenges do real-life women politicians face as they represent themselves to voters and to the press?
Mary Anne Marsh is a Boston-based political consultant who has worked on many local and national campaigns. She also serves as a Democratic political analyst on the FOX News Channel and on other national and local media.
Ellen Emerson White is the author of many books for children and teens, including the critically acclaimed President’s Daughter series, which chronicles the experiences of a Massachusetts girl whose mother becomes the first female president of the United States.
Moderator: Marah Gubar, Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, is the author of Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2009).

On-Campus Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2015-11-19 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Come join us for snacks, ask questions, and learn about the CMS Master’s Program.
Slots are limited. Register now at Eventbrite!
This program will be livestreamed, with a moderated chat room at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cEyEXhb4ryX.

CMS Alumni Panel
2015-11-19 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, join us for our annual colloquium featuring alumni of CMS, discussing their lives from MIT to their careers today.
Margaret Weigel, ’02
Dan Roy, ’07
Ilya Vedrashko, ’06

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

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

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

"Theory" and its Quotation Marks
2016-01-19 - 2016-01-21 | TBA
Full info at http://student.mit.edu/iap/ns82.html:
Lilia Kilburn, Katie Arthur
Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
The aim of this course is to provide an opportunity to explore (and a community with which to do so) the longstanding dialogue in the humanities commonly known as “theory,” using inroads offered by certain modifiers (queer theory, feminist theory, media theory, critical race theory, affect theory and so forth). “Theory” is a word to which some people express an allergic reaction, but we posit that the transformative potential of many of these theoretical writings, and the power of the critiques they render, make them worth the occasional difficulty.
Everyone is welcome, with or without any background or experience in theory or literature! We will provide short readings for each session, and we recommend that you commit to the full program, however, you may also attend individual sessions.
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Contact: Lilia Kilburn, liliak@mit.edu
