Imagining Prototypes: Writing about Design
2020-01-09 13:00 - 15:00, 2020-01-13 13:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | 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.

Lily Bui, “Centering Peripheries: Warning Systems and Disaster Risk Reduction Planning on the Island City”
2020-04-23 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Lily Bui, Ph.D., MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
[Limited to CMS/W community.]
Warning systems play a crucial role in disaster events on islands, some of the most vulnerable places in the world. They enable timely communication of risk, bolstering capacity and counterbalancing the negative force exerted by hazards, exposures, and vulnerabilities that threaten island communities. Disasters frequently result in the breakdown of communication due to both structural (i.e., power outages, failed telecommunications equipment, aging infrastructure) and nonstructural issues (i.e., governance, socioeconomic inequity, language barriers). Through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, document review and spatial data visualization, this dissertation compares the hurricane warning systems of two U.S. island cities: San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Honolulu, O’ahu, Hawaii, during Hurricane Maria (2017) and Hurricane Lane (2018), respectively. This talk will share research that proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating warning systems that takes into consideration the temporal aspects of warning. The framework illustrates the ways in which warning and planning are interrelated, as well as how planning and warning processes take place over time.
Lily Bui received her Ph.D. from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, whose work focuses on disaster early warning systems on urban islands. She holds an S.M. from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and a dual bachelor’s in International Studies and Spanish from her alma mater, University of California, Irvine. She serves as an advisory board member for UC Irvine’s Emergency Management and Disaster Recovery Certificate Program.

Sasha Costanza-Chock presents Design Justice
2020-04-28 18:00 - 19:00 | MIT Press Bookstore, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

Katha Seidman, “Historic Drama-Documentaries and Immersive Installations”
2020-04-30 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
Emmy Award-winning production designer Katha Seidman
Katha Seidman has designed many historic drama-documentaries and built a number of immersive installations. Although these two design challenges often seem to cross-reference, she believes they should be treated quite differently. This talk will compare the development of one specific set, a depiction of Lavoisier’s laboratory in 1778 when he discovers oxygen, with an immersive shadow-play I’m developing that conjures a clandestine meeting of the Vigilant Committee of New York Cityabolitionists in 1851.
A five-time nominee and three-time Emmy Award winning production designer, Seidman has designed many historic drama-documentaries for PBS, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel. In addition, she creates immersive installations, some in collaboration with other artists and others as solo shows. She is currently working on two installations, a collaborative 3-D graphic novel and an immersive shadow-play about an imagined meeting of Abolitionists after the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

Faking the Powerful
2020-08-27 12:00 - 12:45 | MA
Deepfakery: A Livestream Talk Series and Exploration of Critical Questions

Not Funny Anymore: Deepfakes, Manipulated Media, and Mis/disinformation
2020-09-03 12:00 - 12:45 | MA

Using AI-generated Face Doubles in Documentary: Welcome to Chechnya
2020-09-08 12:00 - 13:30 | MA

CMS graduate student administrivia session
2020-09-10 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
A roundtable co-hosted by Academic Administrator Shannon Larkin and Ladybird, this first Colloquium of the semester is for CMS graduate students to learn everything they need to know about completing a master’s degree but were afraid to ask.

Attendees may want to take a look at the CMS Student Resources page for ideas of the range of things they might bring up with Shannon and each other.

Boundary Lines? Deepfakes Weaponized Against Journalists and Activists
2020-09-17 12:00 - 12:45 | MA

Kishonna Gray, "Intersectional Tech: Exploring the Black Cultural Production of Gamers in Transmediated Culture"
2020-09-17 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

With this presentation, Dr. Kishonna Gray illustrates a framework for studying the intersectional development of technological artifacts and systems and their impact on Black cultural production and social processes. Using gaming as the glue that binds this project, she puts forth intersectional tech as a framework to make sense of the visual, textual, and oral engagements of marginalized users, exploring the complexities in which they create, produce, and sustain their practices. Gaming, as a medium often outside conversations on Blackness and digital praxis, is one that is becoming more visible, viable, and legible in making sense of Black technoculture. Intersectional tech implores us to make visible the force of discursive practices that position practices within (dis)orderly social hierarchies and arrangements. The explicit formulations of the normative order are sometimes in disagreement with the concrete human condition as well as inconsistent with the consumption and production practices that constitute Black digital labor. It is, in fact, these practices that inform the theoretical underpinnings of Black performances, cultural production, exploited labor, and resistance strategies inside oppressive technological structures that Black users reside.

Engaging intersectionality across transmediated platforms reveals a significant moment of critiquing narratives, creating content, and controlling narratives. The aftermath of Mike Brown’s death in 2014, for instance, revealed the power of this innovative engagement that the once-invisible could now actively engage, participate, and produce content in hypervisible ways. In the context of #BlackLivesMatter, the combination of the textual and the visual ignited not only a movement, but a proclamation of reclaiming narratives and identities across media and platforms – from BlackLivesMatter to Black-ish to “The Breakfast Club.” It is important to examine the everydayness of mediated, intersectional, counterpublics to examine Black oral, visual, and textual culture in digital spaces and how this manifests within gaming culture. The transmediated nature of contemporary gaming communities affords the possibility of reframing traditional narratives, controlling and producing content, sustaining Black cultural production.

Dr. Kishonna L. Gray (@kishonnagray) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois – Chicago. Dr. Gray is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar and digital herstorian whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, video games, and Black Cyberfeminism. Dr. Gray’s recent monograph, Intersectional Tech: The Transmediated Praxis of Black Users in Digital Gaming (LSU Press, 2020) explores the visual, textual, and/or oral engagement of the Black body in transmediated spaces, focusing on the critical deconstruction of the exploited, hypervisible, labor of any associated Black performances (online and ‘IRL’).

She is also the author of Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014) co-editor of Feminism in Play (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018) and Woke Gaming (University of Washington Press, 2018). Dr. Gray has published in a variety of outlets across disciplines and has also been featured in public outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, The New York Times, Business Insider, CNET, BET, and others.

Manipulating Memories: Archives, History and Deepfakes
2020-09-24 12:00 - 12:45 | MA

Justin Reich, "Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education"
2020-09-24 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

In the 2000s and 2010s, education technology evangelists promised that new learning media would transform schooling and education. Then, a pandemic shut down schools all over the world, and online learning face a pivotal moment, and left a global public mostly disappointed. Instead of adaptive tutors, artificial intelligence, MOOCs or other new technologies, most learners got digital worksheets on learning management systems and ZOOM lecturers. Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education explores the recent history of large scale learning technologies to explain why technology provides such uneven support—useful in some contexts but not others, to some people but not others—to learners. The book concludes by examining four as-yet intractable dilemmas that learning media researchers and designers can use to identify persistent challenges in using technology to accelerate human learning.

Justin Reich is the Mitsui Career Development Professor of Comparative Media at MIT, and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. He is the host of the TeachLab podcast, the author of the forthcoming book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education from Harvard University Press, and the instructor for six massive open online courses on EdX and available through the MIT Open Learning Library.

Still Funny?: Satire, Deepfakes, and Human Rights Globally
2020-10-01 12:00 - 12:45 | MA

Jing Wang, "Walking Around Obstacles: Nonconfrontational Activists in Gray China"
2020-10-01 17:00 - 18:30 | Fall 2020 Colloquium Livestream, Cambridge, 02139
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

Is there digital activism in China? What is it like to be an activist running a grassroots NGO in a land of censors? Is the state-public relationship in China antagonistic by default as our mainstream media would like us to believe? Are citizens of illiberal societies brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear? This talk challenges some of the binary assumptions we make about activism and China by bringing our attention to the gray zones in China where nonconfrontational activists are building an invisible and quiet coalition to bring incremental progress to their society. Wang will talk about NGO2.0, a grassroots organization she founded in China, provide examples of nonconfrontational activism staged on Weibo and WeChat, and introduce Future Village, a design4good project that calls for multi-sectoral collaboration that NGO2.0 is building.

Jing Wang is the founder and director of MIT New Media Action Lab and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board for Creative Commons China. She is also the founder and secretary-general of NGO2.0, a grassroots nonprofit organization based in Beijing and Shenzhen. Her current research interests include entertainment media in China and the US, advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, and nonprofit technology.

Eric Gordon, "Towards a Meaningfully Inefficient Smart City"
2020-10-08 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

Mainstream “smart” city discourse offers a technocentric, efficiency-driven utopian fantasy that elides or exacerbates many urban problems of the past and present. Significant critical literature has emerged in recent years that highlights the importance of lived experience in smart cities, wherein values of equity, quality of life, and sustainability are prioritized. This literature has focused on models that center people in the design and implementation of smart city plans. Instead of maximizing efficiency, these models strategically produce what I call meaningful inefficiencies into process and outcomes, or the intentionally designed productive lag in a system wherein users are able to explore, connect, and invent in a non-prescribed fashion. In this talk, Visiting Professor Eric Gordon will discuss a recent project in Boston, MA in collaboration with the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, called Beta Blocks, that uses meaningful inefficiency as a structuring logic for sourcing, questioning and making decisions about public realm technologies.

Eric Gordon is a visiting professor in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT and a professor of Media Art at Emerson College, where he directs the Engagement Lab. His research focuses on the transformation of public life and governance in digital culture, and the incorporation of play into collaborative design processes. He is the editor of Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016) and the author of Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Laura Partain, “Race and Representation of Syrian, Palestinian, and Norwegian Refugees in the News”
2020-10-15 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
[Streamed live at https://mit.zoom.us/j/94087151099.]

This talk will discuss contemporary US feelings towards Syrian and Palestinian refugee resettlement and expectations for “appropriate” refugee attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Laura Partain’s findings come out of a generalizable experimental analysis conducted with native-born US citizens in December of 2019. Putting these views into an historical context, she explains that what might immediately be perceived as unexpected experimental results are actually the logical evolution of the 20th and 21st century US racial episteme: US participants are more likely to support the resettlement of darker phenotype refugees, but hold more amicable views of lighter phenotype refugees. Moreover, participants’ association with the Christian faith identity was the most reliable predictor of anti-immigrant views. During this discussion, Laura will tie her research into ongoing conversations about nationalism and national belonging, as well as the ways in which social-expectations placed on displaces peoples can limit their access to civic, medical, and everyday resources.

Laura Partain is a Visiting Lecturer in Civic and Global Media within MIT’s CMS/W. She researches complex news and social media effects on marginalized communities’ access to socio-political, material, and medical resources. Her scholarship is located at the interstices of citizenship status and national belonging. Laura’s work uses experimental analyses to develop media interventions for prejudice reduction and focuses on the media effects of racial, religious, and ethnic identity representations. Laura has worked with communities in Syria, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, and Iran, but also works with these communities who are forcibly displaced in diaspora (i.e. refugees, asylum seekers) as well as with Arab and Muslim Americans more broadly. Her published research includes articles in the Journal of Applied Communication Research and Communication Methods and Measures, among others.
