POSTPONED: “No Yankee Rule for Us”: Annexation Rumors and the Interwar Circum-Caribbean Black Press
2019-05-01 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
We hope to reschedule this event for the 2019/2020 academic year.

Reena N. GoldthreeAssistant Professor of African American StudiesPrinceton University
In the aftermath of World War I, rumors that the United States was planning to annex the islands of the British West Indies swept across the Caribbean, sparking panics in Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, and elsewhere. Annexation rumors were transmitted by sailors and migrants as well as by the cosmopolitan circum-Caribbean black press, which reprinted stories from throughout the Americas. In this talk, Reena N. Goldthree, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, examines how Caribbean newspapers–published in the islands and in the diaspora–both facilitated the spread of annexation rumors and provided a crucial platform for West Indians to challenge U.S. imperial expansion.

Media in Transition 10: A Reprise – Democracy and Digital Media
2019-05-17 - 2019-05-18 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Save the date! An official call for papers will be distributed in early September 2018.
In 1998, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program held the first Media in Transition (MiT) conference and inaugurated a related book series. Research from that first MiT conference appeared in Democracy and New Media, Jenkins & Thorburn, eds., (MIT Press, 2003). Now, twenty years later, we are organizing the 10th iteration of the event. Much has changed over these two decades, but the theme “democracy and digital media” is as urgent as ever. Twenty years ago there was no Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix. iPhones and Samsung Galaxies had not yet hit the shelves. And Siri and Alexa were still in development. Since 1998, media have undergone major transition. We have witnessed a shift from Napster to Spotify, from Web 1.0 to 2.0, from console games to Twitch TV, and beyond. We have experienced the rise of social media, civic media, algorithmic cultures, and have seen ever greater concentration of media ownership. The events of 9/11 catalyzed intensified state surveillance and privatized security using various media technologies. Undergirding these shifts have been major transformations in global media infrastructure, the platformization of the Internet, and the ubiquity of themobile phone.
In the US, we also have seen changes in the news ecosystem with the likes of ProPublica and community engagement journalism. At the same time, public trust in media has dropped from 55% in 1998 to 32% in 2016, according to Pew. For better and worse, a growth of interest in media ritual and a decline in the more familiar transmission paradigm is underway. Given such changes concepts of participation, trust, and democracy are increasingly fraught, essential, and powerfully repositioned. How will our news media look and sound in the next decade? What can we learn from news media of the past? What can international perspectives reveal about the variability and fluidity of media landscapes?
We are interested in how these issues play out across media, whether as represented in television series and films, or enacted in rule set and player interactions in games, or enabled in community media, social media, and talk radio. We welcome research that considers these issues in public media and commercial media, with individual users and collective stakeholders, across media infrastructures and media texts, and embedded in various historical eras or cultural settings.

Christopher Weaver, “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”
2019-09-12 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Christopher Weaver
While the appeal of games may be universal and satisfy our innate desire to play, the powerful dynamics that govern our behavior within games is even more interesting than the play itself. Can we broaden our understanding of play mechanisms by applying the subliminal mechanics of play beyond games? Join Christopher Weaver, Founder of Bethesda Softworks, who teaches engineering and computational media respectively at MIT and Wesleyan, as he explores these important issues in a lecture entitled “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”. Prof. Weaver will discuss how games work and why they are such potent tools in areas as disparate as military simulation, childhood education, and medicine.
Christopher Weaver is Research Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Comparative Media Studies, Visiting Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Microphotonics Center and Distinguished Professor of Computational Media at Wesleyan University.
Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry Scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual Masters Degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, Weaver founded Bethesda Softworks, and developed a physics-based, realtime sports engine used to create the original John Madden Football for Electronic Arts. Bethesda is well known for The Elder Scrolls role-playing series of which Skyrim was the latest major installment. An adviser to both government and industry, Weaver holds patents in interactive media, security, and telecommunications engineering.

Ian Condry, “Sound, Learning and Democracy: The Curvature of Social Space-Time through Japanese Music, from Underground Techno to Pop Idols”
2019-09-19 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Ian Condry, cultural anthropologist in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
The talk will explore contemporary Japanese music, with a comparison of diverse examples, such as female Japanese rappers, underground techno festivals, the virtual idol Hatsune Miku, and the pop idol group AKB48. How can music help us understand the curvature of social space-time? What does this mean for our understanding of society, culture, and media?
Ian Condry is a cultural anthropologist in the department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT, where he has taught since 2002. He is the author of two books, Hip-Hop Japan and The Soul of Anime, both of which have been translated into Japanese. He organizes the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project and a new initiative called Dissolve Music,which brings together musicians, sound artists, technologists and educators to use audio experiences to dissolve the structures of inequality.

Nick Montfort, “Poet/Programmers, Artist/Programmers, and Scholar/Programmers: What and Who Are They?”
2019-09-26 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick Montfort, Professor of Digital Media at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Computer programming is a general-purpose way of using computation. It can be instrumental (oriented toward a predefined end, as with the development of well-specified apps and Web services) or exploratory (used for artistic work and intellectual inquiry). Professor Nick Monfort’s emphasis in this talk, as in his own work, is on exploratory programming, that type of programming which can be used as part of a creative or scholarly methodology. He will say a bit about his own work but will use much of the discussion to survey how many other poet/programmers, artist/programmers, and scholar/programmers are creating radical new work and uncovering new insights.
Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Recent books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press) and several books of computational poetry: Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2×6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.

Helen Elaine Lee: "Pomegranate"
2019-10-03 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Helen Elaine Lee
At this week’s colloquium, Helen Elaine Lee reads from the manuscript of her novel, Pomegranate, about a recovering addict who is getting out of prison and trying to stay clean, regain custody of her children, and choose life. Professor Lee, who teaches writing in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is also Director of MIT’s Program in Women’s & Gender Studies. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Her first novel, The Serpent’s Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second novel, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short story “Blood Knot” appeared in the spring 2017 issue of Ploughshares and the story “Lesser Crimes” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Callaloo. She recently finished The Unlocked Room, a novel about a group of people who are incarcerated in two neighboring U.S. prisons and the woman who comes to teach them poetry as she searches for her lost brother.

Design and Semantics of Form and Movement
2019-10-09 - 2019-10-11 | Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

Anushka Shah, “How Entertainment Can Help Fix the System”
2019-10-10 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Anushka Shah, founder of Civic Studios and the Civic Entertainment project at the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab.
Around the world, citizens are saying the system is broken. If it’s education and schools one day, it’s healthcare the next. Our trust in politics and public institutions is falling globally, and our confidence in the ability to solve problems around us is teetering.
Can entertainment and pop culture be a way out? Can films, television shows, and digital content become spaces to teach us how to fix our systems? Can we create influential media that changes how we talk about identity, social justice, public institutions, and citizen power?
In this talk, Anushka Shah, founder of the production house Civic Studios and the Civic Entertainment project at the MIT Media Lab, explores how entertainment can provide alternate narratives of citizen participation.
Shah’s Civic Entertainment project explores the intersection of civic participation with film, television, radio, theatre and digital entertainment. The project focuses on researching the media effects of fiction towards thought and behavior change, explores how methods of social change available to citizens can be best represented in entertainment media, and investigates the representation of protest and activism in current popular culture.
Her production firm Civic Studios focuses on creating such civic entertainment content for Indian audiences. The aim of the content is to empower audiences by addressing the lack of trust in public institutions, knowledge of government and democratic systems, and increasing self-efficacy to participate in change as a citizen.
Originally from Mumbai, India, Anushka divides her time between Mumbai, Boston, and Chicago. She has a background in applied statistics and digital text analysis, and has also previously worked with non-profits and political parties in India.

Vivek Bald, “If I Could Reach the Border...”
2019-10-17 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vivek Bald, filmmaker and Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media
Vivek Bald, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media, will read from a new essay that uses a teenage encounter with police and the justice system to explore questions of immigrant acceptability, racialization, and the South Asians American embrace of model minority status. He will also provide an update on his documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem, recently funded by the PBS-affiliated Center for Asian American Media, and currently being edited by Comparative Media Studies master’s alum, Beyza Boyacioglu. Between the essay and film, Bald will reflect on South Asian American experiences of multi-racial identity and histories of cross-racial community-making.
Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013).

William Uricchio, “Why Co-Create? And Why Now? Reports from A Field Study”
2019-10-24 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
William Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab
Co-Creation is picking up steam as a claim, aspiration, and buzz-word du jour. But what is and why does it matter? Drawing on a just-released field study, Collective Wisdom, this session will address those questions and explore the method’s implications for just and equitable creation. It will consider co-creation in the arts with communities, across disciplines and organizations, and with non-humans (both biological and AI systems), calling out precedents and best practices in a broad array of communities, including historically marginalized groups. What are the trends, opportunities, and challenges bound up in co-creation and its various deployments, and why it is increasingly urgent in our time?
William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He, together with Katerina Cizek, authored Collective Wisdom — a field study on co-creation. His current research considers co-creation, documentary, and the epistemological crisis that characterizes our time.

Lucy Suchman, “Artificial Intelligence & Modern Warfare”
2019-11-07 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lucy Suchman, Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
In June of 2018, following a campaign initiated by activist employees within the company, Google announced its intention not to renew a US Defense Department contract for Project Maven, an initiative to automate the identification of military targets based on drone video footage. Defendants of the program argued that that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of US drone operations, not least by enabling more accurate recognition of those who are the program’s legitimate targets and, by implication, sparing the lives of noncombatants. But this promise begs a more fundamental question: What relations of reciprocal familiarity does recognition presuppose? And in the absence of those relations, what schemas of categorization inform our readings of the Other? The focus of a growing body of scholarship, this question haunts not only US military operations but an expanding array of technologies of social sorting. Understood as apparatuses of recognition (Barad 2007: 171), Project Maven and the US program of targeted killing are implicated in perpetuating the very architectures of enmity that they take as their necessitating conditions. Taking any apparatus for the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force as problematic, this talk joins a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, infrastructures and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. Lucy Suchman’s concern is with the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of (in)security, their deadly and injurious effects, and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations. She closes with some thoughts on how we might interrupt the workings of these apparatuses, in the service of wider movements for social justice.
Lucy Suchman is a Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom.

2019 Comparative Media Studies Graduate Admissions Information Session
2019-11-14 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
Please RSVP. Meet faculty and research managers, learn about the program, and ask questions. The event is twofold: there will be a presentation and Q&A from 2-4pm. In addition, attendees are invited to attend that day’s Colloquium, which will feature CMS/W Head Eric Klopfer presenting on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games.
Those who can’t attend in person are welcome to follow the live stream on our YouTube channel (no registration required): https://www.youtube.com/c/MITComparativeMediaStudiesWriting.

Eric Klopfer, “Design Based Research on Participatory Simulations”
2019-11-14 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Eric Klopfer
An important part of the work done at the The Education Arcade is based on a process of Design Based Research (DBR). In DBR, we design products that are meant to fill real classroom needs and then iteratively test and refine them. Eric Klopfer and The Education Arcade are currently working on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games.
During this talk, attendees will have a chance to play a couple of these games and participate in a design discussion with one of the games that is currently in progress.
Professor Klopfer, currently Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. He is also a co-faculty director for MIT’s J-WEL World Education Lab.

Paloma Duong, “Portable Postsocialisms [postsocialismos de bolsillo]”
2019-11-21 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Paloma Duong, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies
How do Cuban culture and media register the defining aspects of its transformation at the turn of the 21st century: the expansion of transnational capitalist markets, the proliferation of digital media, and the simultaneous reorganization of its official state ideology and its social imaginaries? This talk will explore competing narratives about Cuba’s postsocialist moment across a range of cultural and media practices—from music to memes—inviting us to consider whether we can continue to frame Cuba as a regional exception. We will also examine how revisiting our assumptions about digital media and cultural agency, both in Cuba and in the broader hemispheric context, can speak to the dreams and demands of constituencies that operate between, beneath, and beyond the pressures of global markets and the nation-state.
Paloma Duong is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at MIT. At the intersection of cultural studies, media theory, and political philosophy, Paloma researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. She is currently writing Portable Postsocialisms: Culture and Media in 21st century Cuba, a book-length study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Art Margins, and Cuban Counterpoints: Public Scholarship about a Changing Cuba.

T.L. Taylor, “Play as Transformative Work”
2019-12-05 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
T.L. Taylor, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT
Professor of Comparative Media Studies T.L. Taylor will explore the ways game live streamers are transforming their otherwise private play into public entertainment. She will focus on this new form of creative labor and offer a challenge to current models of IP and fandom, suggesting the work of professional live streamers is not easily captured by non-commercial frameworks nor simple work/play dichotomies.
T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies and co-founder and Director of Research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to supporting and developing fair and inclusive esports. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades. Dr. Taylor’s research explores the interrelations between culture and technology in online leisure environments. Her book Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, 2012) chronicles the rise of esports and professional computer gaming. Her book about game live streaming – Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton University Press) – is now out and is the first of its kind to chronicle this emerging media space.

Imagining Prototypes: Writing about Design
2020-01-09 13:00 - 15:00, 2020-01-13 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 169, Access Via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nora Jackson, Karen Pepper
Enrollment: Limited: Advance sign-up required
Sign-up by 01/03
Limited to 10 participants
Attendance: Participants must attend all sessions
An activity-based writing workshop for anyone who builds anything at MIT and beyond, or who dreams of doing so. The workshop will introduce techniques in writing for designers who rely on written or oral communication to generate interest in a design idea or prototype.
Thursday 1/9 from 1-3 pm: discussion of a pre-circulated reading packet with design writing samples; come to the workshop with an object/prototype in mind that you will write about by Mon 1/13
Monday 1/13 from 1-3 pm: workshop participants present and peer review their design write-ups

Contact: norajack@mit.edu and kpepper@mit.edu
Sponsor(s): Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Comparative Media Studies
Contact: Nora Jackson, norajack@mit.edu

Session 1

Jan/09
Thu
01:00PM-03:00PM
56-169

discussion of a pre-circulated reading packet with design writing samples; come to the workshop with an object/prototype in mind that you will write about by Mon 1/13
Nora Jackson, Karen Pepper

Session 2

Jan/13
Mon
01:00PM-03:00PM
56-169

workshop participants present and peer review their design write-ups
Nora Jackson, Karen Pepper

DJ History and Technology
2020-01-10 14:00 - 16:00, 2020-01-17 14:00 - 16:00, 2020-01-24 14:00 - 16:00, 2020-01-31 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

Matthew Berland, “Creative Agency: Making, Learning, and Playing towards Understanding Computational Content”
2020-02-13 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Matthew Berland, Associate Professor of Design, Informal, and Creative Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
People often learn complex computational content most easily and deeply when they have “creative agency” – the social network, ability, skills, resources, and support to collaboratively and playfully make creative computational content in feedback-rich environments. This talk will present a lens on how we can create environments where learners are supported in developing creative agency, and how we might assess or evaluate success. Matthew Berland will cover his projects in museums, computer science classrooms, after-school clubs, and universities, showing how we can use design-based research, learning analytics, and games to enable creative agency towards more equitable outcomes and better understand how, why, and when people make and learn complex computational content together.
Matthew Berland is an Associate Professor of Design, Informal, and Creative Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spending 2019-2020 as a visiting scholar in CMS/W at MIT. In addition, he is the director of the UW Games Program and the Complex Play Lab and Affiliate Faculty in Computer Sciences, Information Studies, STS, and the Learning Sciences. He uses design-based research and learning analytics to design, create, and study learning environments that support students’ creativity in learning computational literacies, systems literacies, and computer science & engineering content.

Desmond Upton Patton, “Contextual Analysis of Social Media: The Promise and Challenge of Eliciting Context in Social Media Posts with Natural Language Processing”
2020-02-20 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Desmond Upton Patton, Associate Professor of Social Work, Columbia University
While natural language processing affords researchers an opportunity to automatically scan millions of social media posts, there is growing concern that automated computational tools lack the ability to understand context and nuance in human communication and language. Columbia University’s Desmond Upton Patton introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in social media data. The Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach considers and critiques the gap between inadequacies in natural language processing tools and differences in geographic, cultural, and age-related variance of social media use and communication. CASM utilizes a team-based approach to analysis of social media data, explicitly informed by community expertise. The team uses CASM to analyze Twitter posts from gang-involved youth in Chicago. They designed a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of a support vector machine using CASM hand-labeled posts against a distant model. They found that the CASM-informed hand-labeled data outperforms the baseline distant labels, indicating that the CASM labels capture additional dimensions of information that content-only methods lack. They then question whether this is helpful or harmful for gun violence prevention.

Marina Bers, “Coding in Early Childhood: Storytelling or Puzzle Solving?”
2020-02-27 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Marina Bers, Tufts University
Computer programming is an essential skill in the 21st century and new policies and frameworks are in place for preparing students for computer science. Today, the development of new interfaces and block-programming languages, facilitates the teaching of coding and computational thinking starting in kindergarten. However, as new programming languages that are developmentally appropriate emerge, it is not enough to copy models developed for older children, which mostly grew out of traditional STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) disciplines and instructional practices. In this talk, Prof. Marina Bers will describe current research on a pedagogical approach for early childhood computer science education called “Coding as Another Language” (CAL), grounded on the principle that learning to program involves learning how to use a new language (a symbolic system of representation) for communicative and expressive functions. Due to the critical foundational role of language and literacy in the early years, the teaching of computer science can be augmented by models of literacy instruction. Case studies of young children using either the KIBO robot or the ScratchJr app, designed by Prof Bers, to illustrate the instructional practices of CAL curriculum will be presented, as well as novel approaches using fMRI to explore what regions of the brain activate when coding.

Marina Umaschi Bers (tufts.edu/~mbers01) is a professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote children’s positive development. She also developed and serves as director of the graduate certificate program on Early Childhood Technology at Tufts University.
Prof. Bers is passionate about using the power of technology to promote positive development and learning for young children. Bers’ philosophy and theoretical approach as well as the curriculum and assessment methods can be found in her books “Coding as Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom” (Routledge, 2018); “The Official ScratchJr Book” (2015; No Starch Press); “Designing Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: From Playpen to Playground” (2012, Oxford University Press); and “Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom” (2008; Teacher’s College Press).
Prof. Bers loves teaching and in 2016 she received the Outstanding Faculty Contribution to Graduate Student Studies award at Tufts University which recognizes her mentorship.

Shawna Kidman, “The Infrastructure of the U.S. Comic Book Industry and the Long History of Superheroes in Hollywood”
2020-03-05 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Shawna Kidman, Assistant Professor, University of California San Diego
This talk will discuss the history of the American comic book industry during the 20th century. This medium has dominated the film and television landscape in recent years, and has come to define contemporary corporate transmedia production. But before moving to the center of mainstream popular culture, comic books spent half a century wielding their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business. Dr. Kidman will argue that the best way to understand the immense influence of this relatively small business is through a political economic analysis. Specifically, she will discuss industrial infrastructure—the aspects of our media environment that often lack public visibility, including distribution, copyright and contract law, and financing. These systems channeled the industry’s growth and ultimately gave the medium its shape. Accordingly, a closer look at the everyday intricacies of the business yields a very different kind of narrative about what comic books are and how they came to be. It also helps explain why comic books and comic book strategies became so central to media production in the 21st century, and why these trends are likely to persist well into the future.
Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego where she teaches courses in media studies. Her research on the media industries has been published in Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood (UC Press, 2019), a history of the U.S. comic book industry’s convergence with the film and television business. Before earning her PhD in Critical Media Studies at USC, Shawna worked in the media business, including as a creative executive at DC Comics.

POSTPONED UNTIL SPRING 2021: Meghan Sutherland, “Variety, Genealogy, History: On the Politics of Media Convergence”
2020-03-12 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Meghan SutherlandAssociate Professor of Cinema and Visual StudiesUniversity of Toronto
This talk illuminates a bond between the variety form, the concept of genealogy, and the colonial logics of racial, ethnic and sexual differentiation that have defined the project of modern liberalism as one of social and technological development. In doing so, it aims to recast the phenomenon of “media convergence” as a matter of aesthetic form that is not only fundamental to the biopolitical imaginary of liberalism and neoliberalism, but is fundamental as well to the idea of governmental “technology” on which the latter is predicated–a scenario that stands to change how we think about the political entanglement of form and technology more broadly.
Meghan Sutherland is Associate Professor of Cinema and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto and a founding co-editor of the online journal World Picture. She is also the author of The Flip Wilson Show (Wayne State University Press, 2008) and a forthcoming book called Variety: The Extra Aesthetic and the Constitution of Modern Media (Duke University Press), and her essays on the intersections between media, philosophy and politics have appeared in a range of different journals and edited volumes.

CANCELLED: Artificial Intelligence and Ethics
2020-03-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 237, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

POSTPONED UNTIL FALL: Elinor Carmi, “Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media”
2020-04-02 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Elinor Carmi, Postdoc Research Associate in digital culture and society, at Liverpool University, UK
Media Distortions is about the power behind producing deviant media categories. It shows the politics behind categories we take for granted such as spam and noise, and what it means to our broader understanding of, and engagement with media. The book synthesizes media theory, sound studies, STS, feminist technoscience, and software studies into a new composition to explore media power. Media Distortions argues that using sound as a conceptual framework is more useful due to its ability to cross boundaries and strategically move between multiple spaces – which is essential for multi-layered mediated spaces. The book introduces two main concepts – Processed Listening and Rhythmedia – to analyse multiplicities of mediated spaces, people and objects. Drawing on repositories of legal, technical and archival sources, the book amplifies three stories about the construction and negotiation of the ‘deviant’ in media. The book starts in the early 20th century with Bell Telephone’s production of noise in the training of their telephone operators and their involvement with the Noise Abatement Commission in New York City. The next story jumps several decades to the early 2000s focusing on web metric standardization in the European Union and shows how the digital advertising industry constructed what is legitimate communication while illegitimizing spam. The final story focuses on the recent decade and the way Facebook constructs unwanted behaviors to engineer a sociality that produces more value. These stories show how deviant categories re-draw boundaries between human and non-human, public and private spaces, and importantly – social and antisocial.
Elinor Carmi is a digital rights advocate, feminist, researcher and journalist who has been working, writing and teaching on deviant media, internet standards, (cyber)feminism, sound studies and internet governance. Her second monograph will be out by the end of 2019 titled “Digital Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media”, published on Digital Formation series at Peter Lang publishing. Currently Elinor is a Postdoc Research Associate in digital culture and society, at Liverpool University, UK, working on several ESRC and AHRC projects and part of the Nuffield Foundation funded project Me and My Big Data: Developing UK Citizens Data Literacies. At the moment she is working on two special issues: for Theory, Culture & Society together with Brittany Paris about ‘Redesigning Time’, and for the Internet Policy Review together with Simeon Yates about ‘what digital literacy mean today’. Before academia, Elinor worked in the electronic dance music industry for various labels, was a radio broadcaster and a music television editor for almost a decade. In 2013, she published a book about the Israeli Psytrance culture titled “TranceMission: The Psytrance Culture in Israel 1989-1999” (Resling Publishing). She also tweets @Elinor_Carmi.

CMS Thesis Day 2020!
2020-04-10 10:00 - 16:00 | MA
Join us as we host our class of ’20 Comparative Media Studies graduate students as they present their master’s theses (virtually this year, sigh). View live via Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oxtCd1DyTy6VglFFEy6jDQ. Presentation order subject to change.

Sam Mendez, “Health Equity Rituals: A Case for the Ritual View of Communication in an Era of Precision Medicine”
Annie Wang, “Creators, Classrooms, and Cells: Designing for the Benefits and Limitations of Learning In Immersive Virtual Reality”
Bueno Bojczuk Camargo, “Connecting Brazilian Rural Schools to the ‘Global Village’: A Critical Assessment of the Geostationary Defense and Strategic Communications Satellite (SGDC-1)”
Han Su, “Theory and Practice Towards A Decentralized Internet”
Anna Chung, “Avoiding “The Algorithm”: Examining anti-algorithmic practices on social media and designing for user agency on algorithm-driven platforms”
Ben Silverman, “Fursonas: Furries, Community, and Identity Online”
Elizabeth Borneman, “Data Visualizations for Perspective Shifts and Community Cohesion”
Judy Heflin, “The Poetics of Latent Space: Computer-generated Literature and the Vectorized Word”

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “Data Feminism”
2020-04-16 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Catherine D’Ignazio ( Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT) and Lauren Klein (Associate Professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University)
[Limited to CMS/W community.]
As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of global corporations, governments, and elite institutions, their unequal conditions of production, their inequitable impacts, and their asymmetrical silences become increasingly more apparent. It is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? For whom? In whose interest? Informed by whose values?” And most importantly, “How do we begin to imagine alternatives for data’s collection, analysis, and communication?” These are some of the questions that emerge from what Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio call Data Feminism (MIT Press 2020). Data feminism is a way of thinking about data science and its products that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought, emerging anti-oppression design frameworks, and scholarship from the fields of Critical Data Studies, Science & Technology Studies, Geography/GIS, Digital Humanities and Human Computer Interaction. An intersectional feminist lens prompts questions about how, for instance, challenges to the male/female binary can also help challenge other binary (and empirically wrong) classification systems. It encourages us to ask how the concept of invisible labor can help to expose the gendered, racialized, and colonial forms of labor associated with data work. And it demonstrates why the data never, ever, speak for themselves. In this talk, D’Ignazio will introduce seven principles for data feminist work: examining and challenging power, rethinking binaries and hierarchies, considering context, embracing pluralism, making labor visible, and elevating emotion. The goal of this work is to transform scholarship into action – to operationalize feminism in order to imagine more ethical and more equitable data practices.
Catherine D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and director of the Data + Feminism Lab. More information about Catherine can be found on her website, kanarinka.com.
Lauren F. Klein is an associate professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. More information about Lauren can be found on her website, lklein.com.
