MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

A Conversation with Guy Maddin
2016-03-10 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Installation artist, filmmaker, and director Guy Maddin
Guy Maddin and his partners are communing with the spirits of long-lost movies. In a conversation with William Uricchio, Maddin will discuss why we should bother digging up filmic and narrative memories from oblivion, how we can take advantage of the Internet to involve new publics, and how the act of doing so might help to create a new web-based art form.
Maddin is an installation artist, writer and filmmaker, the director of eleven feature-length movies, including The Forbidden Room (2015) and My Winnipeg (2007).
In the winter of 2015/16 he and Evan Johnson will launch their major internet interactive work, Seances, which will enable anyone online to “hold séances with” movies fashioned out of fragments of long-lost films.

Ariane Labed From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Maria de Medeiros From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Clara Furey From Seances, Guy Maddin's Internet interactive lost film project

Excellence in Teaching
2016-03-03 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
What separates a good teacher from a great one? How are digital technologies challenging traditional teaching methods? And are there distinctions between top-notch science instructors and their counterparts in humanities or social science? Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, Weisskopf Professor of Physics Alan Guth and MIT biology professor Hazel Sive–all honored teachers–will explore these issues with Literature professor and Communications Forum director emeritus David Thorburn.
David Thorburn is an MIT Literature professor, director emeritus of the Communications Forum, and a past winner of MIT’s MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.
Robert Pinsky is a three-term US Poet Laureate. He is a recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center.
Alan Guth is MIT’s Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, pioneer of the inflationary model of the universe and recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.
Hazel Sive is a biology professor at MIT, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.
A reception in room 14E-304 will follow.

Vincent Brown: "Designing Histories of Slavery for the Database Age"
2016-02-25 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vincent BrownCharles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University
Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to see its traces, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities.
Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice.

Caroline Jack: "How Facts Survive in Public Service Media"
2016-02-18 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caroline Jack, CMS/W Exchange Scholar and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University
Economic literacy has long been touted as a potential solution to national economic crisis and individual financial precarity. But what does it mean to be economically literate? In a field full of contestation, how do some perspectives get disqualified or excluded, and others held up as facts? Between 1976 and 1978, the nonprofit, quasi-governmental public service advertising organization The Advertising Council saturated the American media environment with messages about American citizens’ responsibility to become economically knowledgeable, and distributed over ten million copies of a glossy brochure designed to teach citizens the least they needed to know about the American economic system. Activist groups criticized the Ad Council campaign as propagandistic–but when these groups responded with their own information campaigns, they found themselves excluded from access to public funds and airwaves. Where was the line between objective information and propaganda? Who had the power to decide? How has this dynamic changed over time, as new media technologies have emerged and neoliberal policies and philosophies have moved from the margins to the center of American political culture? In this talk, Jack calls attention to corporate managers and executives as consequential social and ontological actors with distinctive vernacular theories of media and politics.
Caroline Jack is an Exchange Scholar in CMS/W and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her article “Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series” was recently published in Enterprise and Society.

Lisa Parks: "Drone Matters: Vertical Mediation in the Horn of Africa"
2016-02-11 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa ParksUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
Since 2002, the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and CIA have orchestrated a covert drone war from Camp Lemonier in the African country of Djibouti, monitoring and striking alleged al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab suspects in Yemen and Somalia. As a media scholar, UC Santa Barbara’s Lisa Parks is interested both in the discourses that have been used to expose covert US drone interventions and in the ways that drone operations themselves function as technologies of mediation. Drawing upon media such as training manual diagrams, infrared images, Google Earth interfaces, and drone crash scene photos, this talk explores the drone’s mediating work through three registers: the infrastructural, the perceptual, and the forensic. Focusing on maneuvers between the ground and sky, Parks suggest that military drone operations are irreducible to the screen’s display and should be understood as practices of vertical mediation–as practices of communication and materialization that occur dynamically through the vertical field, and, as such, have particular kinds of affects. The talk based on a chapter of her forthcoming book, Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror.
Lisa Parks is Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005) and Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, forthcoming), and is co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003), and another in progress entitled Life in the Age of Drones (under contract, Duke UP). Parks has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a principal investigator on research grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department.

Is There a Future for In-Depth Science Journalism?
2016-02-11 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Traditional media outlets have been facing budget cuts and layoffs for years, with specialized reporters often among the first to go. And yet last year, Boston Globe Media Partners made a significant investment in launching STAT, a new publication that focuses on health, medicine and scientific discovery. STAT‘s leadership and reporting team will discuss the publication’s progress and how the field of science journalism is changing.
Speakers
Rick Berke is the executive editor of STAT and former executive editor of POLITICO. Berke joined The New York Times in 1986 and served as a political correspondent and senior editor for nearly three decades.
Carl Zimmer is a national correspondent for STAT and hosts the site’s “Science Happens” video series. Zimmer also writes the “Matter” column at The New York Times and has written 12 books including Soul Made Flesh, which was named as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Rebecca Robbins is a reporter for STAT covering money in life sciences.
Moderator: Seth Mnookin, associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

Amanda Lotz: "Television Didn't Die: But Broadband Distribution Revolutionized It"
2016-02-04 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Amanda Lotz University of Michigan
Beginning in the late 1990s, the technology and even mainstream press opined extensively on the coming death of television. A decade later—and a time that found television still very much alive—that theme evolved to instead pronounce the coming death of cable. Rather than demise, the emergence of broadband-distributed television has both reinvented the medium and revealed how extensively our expectations and understandings of television are based not on the medium of television but on logics developed for its broadcast distribution.
Amanda D. Lotz’s talk presents key arguments of her current book project, Being Wired: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All with a focus on what transpired when the long anticipated face off between “new media” and television finally took place in 2010.
Lotz is professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan where she studies contemporary media industries, television, and gender and media. She is the author of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York University Press, 2007; Rev. 2nd ed. 2014), Cable Guys: Television and American Masculinities in the 21st Century(2014), and Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era (University of Illinois Press, 2006), and editor of Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era (Routledge, 2009). She is co-author, with Timothy Havens, of Understanding Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2011; 2nd ed. 2016) and, with Jonathan Gray, of Television Studies (Polity, 2011). Her current work examines how cable changed television and became the dominant supplier of internet access in the early twenty-first century.

John Jennings: "The Cipher Back to Here"
2016-02-02 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
John JenningsState University of New York at Buffalo
John Jennings is an Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo-State University of New York. He is the co-author of the graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture, Vol. 1 and the art collection Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture (both with Damian Duffy). Jennings is also the co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem, MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco, and the AstroBlackness colloquium in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Jennings’ current comics projects include the Hiphop adventure comic Kid Code: Channel Zero, the supernatural crime noir story Blue Hand Mojo, and the upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred.

Global Game Jam 2016
2016-01-29 - 2016-01-31 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Please refer to full information and schedule at http://student.mit.edu/iap/ns82.html
Register now at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/global-game-jam-2016-at-mit-tickets-19781298396
The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world’s largest game jam event taking place around the world at physical locations. Think of it as a hackathon focused on game development. It is the growth of an idea that in today’s heavily connected world, we could come together, be creative, share experiences and express ourselves in a multitude of ways using video games – it is very universal. The weekend stirs a global creative buzz in games, while at the same time exploring the process of development, be it programming, iterative design, narrative exploration or artistic expression. It is all condensed into a 48 hour development cycle. The GGJ encourages people with all kinds of backgrounds to participate and contribute to this global spread of game development and creativity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thesis Presentations
of the

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

9:15 Presentations by:

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

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

Liam Andrew The Missing Links: An Archaeology of Digital Journalism

Heather Craig Interactive Data Storytelling: Designing for Public Engagement

Jesse Sell E-sports Broadcasting Conventions

12:30 Lunch Break

1:30 Presentations by:

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

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

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

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

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