MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Yves Citton: "The Humanities' Choice: Knowledge Economy or Culture of Interpretation?"
2011-02-11 14:00 - 15:30 (America/New_York) | MIT Building E40, Room 496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s three-person submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive, Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses — scientific, everyday, and anthropological — of embodied sonic presence.
Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in the limits of “life” as an analytical category for contemporary biology.

Amsterdam and New York: Transnational Photographic Exchange in the Era of Globalization
2011-02-09 16:30 - 18:30 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This lecture will examine the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to a recent art exhibition, commissioned by the Dutch government in 2009, in which a group of contemporary New York artists were invited to photograph Amsterdam to mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of Manhattan.
Registering a long history of transnational exchange between the two cities, the selected artists sought to produce work capable of defamiliarizing established images of Amsterdam. The claim of the exhibition was that seeing Amsterdam through the lens of New York photographers enabled new and surprising perspectives on four key aspects of the city: the street, the night, the water, and the outskirts. Interrogating this claim, the lecture will analyze individual artworks, the marketing and staging strategies of the exhibition, and — most importantly — the role that transnational exchange can play in both resisting and reinforcing dominant, globalized images of contemporary city spaces.
Christoph Lindner is Professor of Literature and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a Research Affiliate at the University of London Institute in Paris. His recent books include Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities (2010), Urban Space and Cityscapes (2006), and Fictions of Commodity Culture (2003).

Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises
2010-11-18 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; Toyota runs reassuring national TV spots within hours of a product recall; and 32 Massachusetts towns successfully publicize water distribution sites following a water main rupture.
However, like the housing collapse or the recent Gulf oil spill, some crises are complex, difficult to warn of, and don’t cleanly fit traditional media frames. They are slow moving, and the media still struggles to rhetorically or technologically cover these simmering, rather than boiling, dramas.
With government regulators weak, corporations still focused on the bottom line, and communities adapting to structural change, this Communications Forum asks: What new media tools and strategies can be used to help everyone better prepare for the unique communications challenges of slow-moving crises?
Andrea Pitzer is editor of Nieman Storyboard, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University that looks at how storytelling works in every medium. Storyboard’s mission is to feature the best examples of visual, audio and multimedia narrative reporting.
An investigative reporter for ProPublica, Abrahm Lustgarten’s recent work has focused on oil and gas industry practices. He is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master’s in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is the author of the book China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, a project that was funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Rosalind Williams is a historian who uses imaginative literature as a source of evidence and insight into the history of technology. She has taught at MIT since 1982 and currently serves as the Dibner Professor for the History of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She has also served as head of the STS Program and Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs at the Institute, as well as president of the Society for the History of Technology. She has written three books as well as essays and articles about the emergence of a predominantly human-built world and its implications for human life. Her forthcoming book extends this theme to examine consciousness of the condition of “human empire” as expressed in the writings of Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson in the late l9th century.
Moderated by Tom Levenson, who is Head and of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies as well as Director of its graduate program. Professor Levenson is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Discover, The Sciences, and he is winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins.
Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

Civic Media and the Law
2010-11-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
What do citizens need to know when they publicly address legally challenging or dangerous topics? Journalists have always had the privilege, protected by statute, of not having to reveal their sources. But as more investigative journalism is conducted by so-called amateurs and posted on blogs or websites such as Wikileaks, what are the legal dangers for publishing secrets in the crowdsourced era? We convene an engaging group law scholars to help outline the legal challenges ahead, suggest policies that might help to protect citizens, and describe what steps every civic media practitioner should take to protect themselves and their users.
Micah Sifry is a co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum.
Daniel Schuman is the policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation, where he helps develop policies that further Sunlight’s mission of catalyzing greater government openness and transparency.
Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media

Humanities in the Digital Age
2010-10-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Alison Byerly
Steven Pinker
What is happening to the intellectual field called the humanities? Powerful political and corporate forces are encouraging, even demanding science and math-based curricula to prepare for a globalized and technological world; the astronomical rise in the cost of higher education has resulted in a drumbeat of complaints, some which question the value of the traditional liberal arts and humanities. And of course, and far more complexly, the emerging storage and communications systems of the digital age are transforming all fields of knowledge and all knowledge industries.
How has and how will the humanities cope with these challenges? How have digital tools and systems already begun to transform humanistic education? How may they do so in the future? More broadly, is there a significant role for the humanities in our digital future? Our panelists will explore these and related questions in what is expected to be the first in a continuing series on this subject.
Alison Byerly is provost and executive vice president and professor of English at Middlebury College.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and previously taught at MIT. He is the author of many essays and books including The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and How the Mind Works.

NGO2.0: When Social Action Meets Social Media
2010-10-14 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jing Wang
Professor Wang will discuss the genesis and implementation of a civic media project that she conceptualized and launched in China in May 2009. The project, titled NGO2.0, is a social experiment that introduces Web 2.0 thinking and social media tools to the grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China. How has new media complicated social action and civic engagement? What are the evolving stakes for social change proponents? How are change agents coping with governmental intervention in a country where social media is held suspect? Professor Wang will speculate on the emergence of a new field of inquiry — social media action research — while sharing insights and findings about her involvement in shaping an NGO 2.0 culture in China.

Online Migration of Newspapers
2010-10-07 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The fate of newspapers is an ongoing subject for the Forum. This conversation explores the migration of newspapers to the internet and what that means for traditional concepts of journalism. Amid the emergence of citizens’ media and the blogosphere, newspapers are adapting to a changing mediascape in which print readership is in steady decline. David Carr, culture reporter and media columnist for the New York Times, and Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University and author of the Media Nation blog, explore these developments with Forum Director David Thorburn.
Among their topics: the best and the worst examples of news on the net, online-only news sites, hyperlocal news and collaborative journalism, business models for online newspapers, and the impact of social media on journalism.

Francisco Ricardo, "The Aesthetics of Projective Spatiality: New Media as Critical Objects"
2010-09-30 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
One theme in the contemporary use of space involves the shift from production modeled around a physical, centralized “locus” to new virtual, extended and multi-axial modes of “projective” organization. We see this in new sculpture, new architecture, and, in electronic art, an expressive embrace of geographic dispersal. Although new materials, methods, and media have been central to modernist optimism, many of their resulting physical and actual constructions have been dismissed, discredited, misunderstood, or attacked. Using physical and virtual examples, Ricardo examines the strange tension between unanimous acceptance of new media and materials and the frequent rejection of new forms and structures they have made possible.
Francisco Ricardo is media and contemporary art theorist. A Research Associate at the University Professors Program and co-director of the Digital Video Research Archive at Boston University, he also teaches digital media theory at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research examines historical, conceptual, and computational intersections between contemporary art and architecture, on one hand,and new media art and literature, on the other. Recent publications include Cyberculture and New Media (Rodopi, 2009) and Literary Art in Digital Performance (Continuum, 2009).

The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab: Phantasmal Media
2010-09-23 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Fox Harrell’s research group — the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab — builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts — “phantasmal media” systems.
In particular, his research uses artificial intelligence/cognitive science-based techniques to understanding the human imagination to invent and better understand new forms of computational narrative, identity, games, and related types of expressive digital media. In this talk, he will discuss his recent works and collaborations including the “Living Liberia Fabric,” an AI-based interactive video documentary produced in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia to memorialize 14 years of civil war, “Generative Visual Renku,” an AI-based form of generative animation, and several other projects.
Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press. Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies, and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

Graphical Expressions of Humanistic Interpretation in Digital Environments
2010-05-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Humanists have adopted visualization techniques with enthusiasm in recent years, borrowing display formats from quantitative approaches rooted in social and natural sciences. But are the standard metrics and conventions developed for analysis of empirical inquiries fundamentally at odds with tenets of traditional humanistic interpretation? How are complexity, contradiction, uncertainty, ambiguity, and other basic features of interpretative activity to be given graphical expression? Does the introduction of affect into visual displays simply shift all visualization towards idiosyncratic and subjective approaches that lack clear legibility? Or can we imagine conventions that might introduce some of the necessary qualifications and variables essential to creating graphical expressions of humanistic interpretation?
Featured speaker: Johanna Drucker is the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA where her research focuses in modeling interpretation for electronic scholarship, digital aesthetics, and the history of visual information design. Her teaching interests include the history of the book and print culture, history of information, and critical studies in visual knowledge representation.
Moderator: Kurt Fendt is director of HyperStudio, MIT̢

ROFLCon
2010-04-30 - 2010-05-01 | MA
Sponsored in part by CMS, ROFLCon is “Two days and two nights of the most epic internet culture conference ever assembled. Informed commentators suggest that this may be the most important gathering of humanity since the fall of the tower of Babel.”
About: roflcon.org
Registration: roflcon.org/registration

12th Annual Media Spectacle
2010-04-26 18:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
An honored tradition returns this Spring when CMS presents the twelfth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by late CMS program administrator Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.
Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device. Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction, and Audience Favorite. The event is judged by esteemed members of the CMS community, including Cathy Pomiecko, Chris’s sister.

CMS 10th Anniversary Symposium
2010-04-23 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
2010 marks the 10th anniversary of Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
This is ten years of groundbreaking applied humanities. Ten years of thinking across media forms, national boundaries, and historical periods. Ten years of bridging theory and practice, of working with industry leaders, artists, and policymakers…ten years of preparing students for jobs that didn’t yet exist.
So we’re hosting a day-long celebration on April 23 looking back over the history of the program, featuring alumni, current students and researchers, and even former director Henry Jenkins. We hope you can make it–and help us shape the next ten years of Comparative Media Studies.

Jenkins' Farewell
2010-04-22 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins’ 20-year presence at MIT was formative for him and profoundly valuable for MIT. A year after his departure for USC, Jenkins returns to talk with long-time colleagues about his pioneering scholarship on digital culture, his work as the founding director of Comparative Media Studies, and his experiences as a teacher and housemaster at MIT.
Moderated by William Uricchio.

Exit Zero: Documentary Filmmaking, Historical Memory, and Personal Voice
2010-04-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This talk explores the making of Exit Zero, an in-progress documentary film about deindustrialization, community, class, and family in a former steel mill region in southeast Chicago. It examines questions of historical memory, the use of personal voice, and the long-standing relationship between anthropology and documentary filmmaking. The film utilizes material from multiple sources, including cinéma vérité footage shot over the course of a decade, interviews, and home movies made by steel mill area residents between the 1930s and 1980s. The talk raises broader questions about the shifting nature of anthropological engagement with media-making and documentary film in particular. Clips from the work-in-progress will be shown.
Chris Boebel is a documentary and narrative filmmaker. He is the writer/director of a number of award-winning short fiction films, the independent feature film Red Betsy, and is co-director of the documentary Containment: Life After Three Mile Island. He currently works as a producer of films about science and engineering at MIT with AMPS/MIT Libraries.
Christine Walley is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. In conjunction with Chris Boebel, she is making Exit Zero. The film serves as a companion to an in-progress book entitled, The Struggle for Existence from the Cradle to the Grave.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies
2010-04-01 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Is our emerging digital culture partly a return to practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before the advent of the printing press? This question has been posed with increasing force in recent years by anthropologists, folklorists, historians and literary scholars, among them Thomas Pettitt, who has contributed significantly to elaborating and communicating the version of this question named in the title of today’s forum.
The concept of a “Gutenberg Parenthesis” — formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark — offers a means of identifying and understanding the period, varying between societies and subcultures, during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period — Shakespeare’s — when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance.
MIT professors Peter Donaldson and James Paradis will join Pettitt in a discussion of the value of historical perspectives on our technologizing human present.

Government Transparency and Collaborative Journalism
2010-03-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Stata Center, Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In December, the Obama administration directed federal agencies and departments to implement “principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration,” including deadlines for providing government information online. At the same time, citizens and journalists are developing new technologies to manage and analyze the exponential increase in data about our civic lives available from governmental and other sources. What new ways of gathering and presenting information are evolving from this nexus of government openness and digital connectedness? Our speakers Linda Fantin, director of public insight journalism at Minnesota Public Radio and Ellen Miller, executive director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, will explore this and related questions. Chris Csikszentmihalyi, director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, moderates the discussion.
Co-Sponsor: MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

CMS Town Hall Forum
2010-03-11 17:00 - 19:00 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Limited to CMS faculty, students, and invitees, this is CMS’s semesterly forum to discuss candidly the successes, challenges, and direction of the program.

Robots and Media: Science Fiction, Anime, Transmedia, and Technology
2010-03-03 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ian Condry
Ian Condry, Associate Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will discuss the prevalence of giant robots in anime (Japanese animated films and TV shows). From the sixties to the present, robot or “mecha” anime has evolved in ways that reflect changing business models and maturing audiences, as can be seen in titles like Astro Boy, Gundam, Macross, and Evangelion. How can we better understand the emergence of anime as a global media phenomenon through the example of robot anime? What does this suggest about our transmedia future?

Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and founder/director of the Lab’s Personal Robots Group, will discuss how science fiction has influenced the development of real robotic systems, both in research laboratories and corporations all over the world. She will explore of how science fiction has shaped ideas of the relationship and role of robots in human society, how the existence of such robots is feeding back into science fiction narratives, and how we might experience transmedia properties in the future using robotic technologies.

MIT/Harvard Cool Japan Project presents "Summer Wars"
2010-03-01 19:00 | MIT Building 26, Room 100, Access Via 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The New England premiere of the anime feature film “Summer Wars” (2009, Director Mamoru HOSODA, Madhouse / Kadokawa). The director and producer of the film, both based in Japan, will be present at the screening and will participate in a Q&A/discussion after the film.
The film explores the drama of high school romance, hackers in virtual worlds, the complexities of extended families, and the potentials of our hyper-connected present. Suitable for all ages but aimed at teens and adults, the film is a wonderful example of recent anime virtuosity by Japan’s hottest young director. Director Hosoda’s previous film, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (2006), won many prizes including the Japan Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
35mm print, Japanese voices, English subtitles. Free and open to the public.

Complete Game-Completion Marathon for Haiti
2010-02-26 - 2010-02-28 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
February 26-28th, GAMBIT will be hosting the 2010 Complete Game-Completion Marathon to raise money for relief efforts in Haiti. Teams of players will gather at our MIT lab to attempt to complete a game in one sitting. Participants will independently seek sponsorship on a dollar/hour basis with all proceeds going directly to relief efforts in Haiti through Partners in Health, and with support from the MIT Public Service Center. The labs will be open 24 hours a day through the weekend to accommodate the teams, with snacks and refreshments available for the players.

Code and Platform in Computational Media
2010-02-25 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick Montfort
Computing plays an important role in some types of media, such as video games, digital art, and electronic literature. It seems evident that an understanding of programming and computing systems may help us learn more about these productions and their role in culture. But few have focused on the levels of code and platform. Adding these neglected levels to digital media studies can help to advance the field, offering insights that would not be found by focusing on the levels of experience and interface by themselves. The recent project of Critical Code Studies and two book series just started by The MIT Press, Software Studies and Platform Studies, represent a new willingness to consider digital media at these levels. With reference to mass-market and more esoteric systems and works, ranging from Atari 2600 and arcade games to Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)], this talk will describe how looking at the code and platform levels can enhance our comparative media studies of computational works.
Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at MIT and has been part of dozens of academic, editorial, and literary collaborations.

Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music
2010-02-11 19:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Organized by the MIT Writers Series.

Combining music documentary and social documentary, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music charts the meteoric rise of South Asian music in 1990’s Britain and the decades of cultural cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that historic moment. Through a dynamic mix of live performances, candid interviews, and rare archival footage, Mutiny presents the story of a generation that grew up defining itself in an environment of racial violence while drawing strength from both British street culture and South Asian roots. The artists who emerged from this generation became some of the greatest innovators in British music, mixing the influences of their parents’ cultures with electronica, hip-hop, reggae, and punk and producing unique and powerful new sounds.
Featuring: Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, Fun-Da-Mental, Anjali, DJ Ritu, Black Star Liner and many others.
Vivek Bald
Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. His previous films include “Taxi-vala/Auto-biography” (1994) about the lives, experiences and activism of immigrant taxi drivers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in early 1990s New York City, as well as “Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music” (2003). His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem.” He is Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Program in Comparative Media Studies.

Old-fashioned Futures and Re-fashionable Media
2010-02-04 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Joel Burges and Wayne Marshall, MIT’s Mellon Fellows in the Humanities (2009-11), will contribute to the rethinking of media studies at MIT by taking up the shared metaphor of fashion—the fashionable, the old-fashioned, the re-fashioned. Burges will talk about the turn away from the digital in contemporary cinema, particularly the case of Fantastic Mr. Fox, in an attempt to think about the uneven development of media over time. Marshall will discuss how popular but privatized platforms like Facebook and YouTube, pop culture fashion—and the negotiable refashionability of both—present crucial challenges to the study of media today.
Joel Burges works at the intersection of literary studies, critical studies, and media studies. His first book, which is in progress, is entitled The Uses of Obsolescence; it considers the fate of historical thinking in the media of late modernity, especially literature and cinema. His second book, in its very early stages, is called Fiction after TV; it considers how a major mode of imaginative processing—fiction—is altered by the introduction of TV to post-1945 mediascapes.
Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist, blogger (wayneandwax.com), and DJ, specializing in the musical and cultural production of the Caribbean and the Americas, and their circulation in the wider world. Currently a Mellon Fellow at MIT, he’s writing a book on music, social media, and digital youth culture. He co-edited and contributed to Reggaeton (Duke 2009) and has published in journals such as Popular Music and Callaloo while writing for popular outlets like XLR8R, The Wire, and the Boston Phoenix.

Global Game Jam
2010-01-29 - 2010-01-31 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
View 2010 projects.

Button Mash: Gender and Gaming at MIT
2010-01-14 13:00 | MIT Building N25, Room 373, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hillary Kolos, Mia Consalvo, and Lynda Williams
Button mashing is one of many stereotypes about women who game that this session will question. This event will explore issues around gender and gaming, as well as be an opportunity for female MIT students who play digital games to come together to talk and play. The day will kick off with a panel discussion with Mia Consalvo, visiting associate professor in CMS, and other female game researchers and/or game industry professionals. Following the panel, there will be time to play and discuss games that are interesting in terms of how they portray gender (i.e., Tomb Raider, Mirror’s Edge, Fat Princess). After a dinner break (pizza will be served!), we will invite all participants to join in on a roundtable discussion of what it’s like to be a woman that games at MIT.

Board/Card Game Design - Expansions
2010-01-11 13:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 135, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ever played a board game and thought it was missing something? That you could make it better? In this class, each group will pick an existing board game and develop an Expansion Pack that extends or modifies the rules.
The first session we will be talking about principles of game design, picking groups, and playing board games. The second will be focused on designing the expansions (with some materials provided). The final session will give groups an opportunity to complete their expansion and play-test each other’s games.

Comparative Media Insights: "Race, Rights, and Virtual Worlds: Digital Games as Spaces of Labor Migration"
2009-12-15 17:15 | MIT Building 14E, Room 310, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa Nakamura
As ICT’s become available to new groups of users, notably those from the global South, new social formations of virtual labor, race, nation, and gender are being born. And if virtual world users’ claims to citizenship and sovereignty within them are to be taken seriously, so too must the question of “gray collar” or semi-legal virtual laborers and their social relations and cultural identity in these spaces. Just as labor migrants around the globe struggle to access a sense of belonging in alien territories, so too do virtual laborers, many of whom are East and South Asian, confront hostility and xenophobia in popular gaming worlds and virtual “workshops” such as World of Warcraft and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Do these users have the right to have rights? This presentation considers the affective investments and cultural identities of these workers within the virtual worlds where they labor.
Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games, the transnational racialized labor, and avatarial capital in a “postracial” world.

Comparative Media Insights: "From Gamer Theory to Critical Practice"
2009-12-15 04:15 - 17:15 | MIT Building 14E, Room 310, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
McKenzie Wark
How might the critical tradition in media studies respond to the wildly proliferating media phenomena of today? In this presentation, Ken Wark starts with his own experience writing Gamer Theory as a ‘networked book’, mediating between Plato, WordPress, and World of Warcraft. This was an experiment in which critical media approaches were made to confront the computer game as an historically specific form, the form perhaps of our times. It was also an attempt to create online tools for a specifically critical mode of collaborative writing, at some remove from the argumentative and consensus style of the blog and wiki respectively. A third dimension to the experiment explored the relation of the gift of writing, of time, of attention, to the commodified form of the book. What can be learned from the results of this experiment? How can media studies be both in and of the emergent media forms, and yet retain a creative and critical distance from them? It is in its difference from what it studies that media studies begins to find the intellectual resources to respond adequately to the extraordinary world of media, in all its historical and anthropological depth and breadth.
McKenzie Wark is chair of Culture & Media and associate dean of Eugene Lang College, and an associate professor of critical studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP, 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard UP, 2007) and various other things.

Comparative Media Insights: "Art of the Impossible: Utopia, Imagination, and Critical Media Practice"
2009-12-07 17:15 | MIT Building 14E, Room 310, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In an economy of informational abundance, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance? Or are there other, perhaps more politically potent, ways of thinking about the liberatory possibilities of media? By considering a range of examples, from Thomas More’s 16th century Utopia to 21st century political art, we will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of mediated utopias as a means of revitalizing the critical practice of communications. Of particular interest are impossible utopias, “no-places” whose unrealizability is inscribed in their depiction. For it is through the encounter with their very impossibility that conditions for new critique and new imagination may be created.
Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture, the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader, and co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920’s New York. He also writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral, The Nation, to the prurient, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of an international direct action group. Currently, he is a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he co-founded and organized “The College of Tactical Culture” and is engaged in an ongoing investigation into the efficacy of political art. He is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.
