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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloadable .mp3Audio stream (captioned)Chapter text as PDF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About The Infiltrators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presentation order:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Cain, “Educated Viewers: Civic Spectatorship, Media Literacy, and American Schools”
2021-09-30 17:00 - 18:30 | Zoom, and (for MIT only) E15-318 Common Area, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, United States
In-person attendance: Only MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass may attend in-person. Your MIT ID will be scanned when you arrive.

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

In 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.

Victoria 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.

CMS Alumni Panel (closed session)
2021-10-07 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
For current CMS grad students only. Guest alums include Eduardo Marisca, Mariel García Montes, Evan Higgins, and Lilia Kilburn. Hosted by Prof. Heather Hendershot.

Nick Thurston, “Document Practices: The Art of Propagating Access”
2021-10-14 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

This 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.

Documents 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.

With 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.

These 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.

About Nick Thurston

Nick 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).

From 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.

Memorial Colloquium for Professor Jing Wang
2021-10-21 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Attending in person: Attendance limited to MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass. Please bring your MIT ID.

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

Professor 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:

Emma 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.

T.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.

Han 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.

Tani 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.

Edward Schiappa, “The Transgender Exigency: The Role of Media Representation”
2021-10-28 17:00 - 18:30 | Streamed live on Zoom
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

This 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.

Edward 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.

Graphic Materiality, Trauma, and Expressionist Comics: Artist's Talk With Leela Corman
2021-11-04 17:00 - 18:30 | Zoom, and (for MIT only) E15-318 Common Area, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, United States
In-person attendance: Only MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass may attend in-person. Your MIT ID will be scanned when you arrive.

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

Join 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.

Corman 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.

Craig Robertson, “‘Information at Your Fingertips’: The Filing Cabinet and the Gendering of Information Work”
2021-11-18 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area) and streamed on Zoom, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, 02139
Attending in person: Attendance limited to MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass. Please bring your MIT ID.

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

In 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.

Craig 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).

Ekene Ijeoma, “Poetic Justice: Art at the same scale society has the capacity to destroy”
2021-12-02 17:00 - 18:30 | Zoom, and (for MIT only) E15-318 Common Area, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, United States
Attending in person: Attendance limited to MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass. Please bring your MIT ID.

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

Founded 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.

Its 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).

Ekene 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.

Alexandra To, “Uplifting Us: Design Opportunities in Centering Racialized Experiences in Games”
2021-12-09 17:00 - 18:30 | Streamed live on Zoom
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

People 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.

Alexandra 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.

Samantha N. Sheppard, “Changing the Subject: Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and the Making of Black Women’s Film History”
2022-02-03 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

Lynn 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.

Samantha 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.

Eric Freedman, “Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans”
2022-02-10 17:00 - 18:30 | Streamed live on Zoom
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

Video 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?

Eric 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.

Jorge Caraballo, “How to Use Audio Storytelling to Cultivate a Community and Keep it Engaged”
2022-02-17 17:00 - 18:30 | Streamed live on Zoom
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

Podcasts 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.

Jorge 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.

Hillary Chute, "Maus Now: Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel and the Present Tense"
2022-02-24 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

In 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.

Hillary 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.
