MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Disney Fairies Film Series
2015-01-07 - 2015-01-16 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Philip Tan, Research Scientist
Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
Prereq: None
The “Disney Fairies” series launched in 2005 with new novels based on the tales of Peter Pan. From the novels and plays of J.M. Barrie and the animated films by Walt Disney Productions, Newbery Honor author Gail Carson Levine developed an elaborate mythology for the fairies of Neverland. The lead character, Tinker Bell, moved from “Disney Princess” marketing efforts into a separate franchise of chapter books, comics, and merchandise. Following Disney’s purchase of Pixar, direct-to-DVD productions of Disney Fairies were restarted and debuted with the 3D computer-animated film “Tinker Bell” in 2008.
While visually consistent with Disney’s earlier interpretations of Neverland, some may find the characterization and the tone of the films surprising. Barrie’s century-old “common pots-and-pans fairy” is reinterpreted as a titular heroine with a unique talent for invention and engineering. Most of the films revolve around Tinker Bell’s ability to construct incredible machines and her irrepressible drive to find and fix “lost things.” The mostly-female cast is generally portrayed as being extremely competent and working collectively to solve problems, even as the films fall back on formulaic personality conflicts.
Children with adult supervision are welcome. Each screening will be followed by an optional, moderated discussion with participants, which may venture into playful, activist, academic or headcanon topics.
This event aims to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone.
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Contact: Philip Tan, 26-149, 617 324-9129, PHILIP@MIT.EDU

Screening times

Jan/07
Wed
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, Tinker Bell

Jan/09
Fri
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure

Jan/12
Mon
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue

Jan/14
Wed
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, Pixie Hollow Games & Secret of the Wings

Jan/16
Fri
02:00PM-03:30PM
2-105, The Pirate Fairy

Children are welcome to the screenings (with adult supervision, please!)

Optional Discussion

Jan/07
Wed
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

Jan/09
Fri
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

Jan/12
Mon
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

Jan/14
Wed
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

Jan/16
Fri
03:30PM-04:30PM
2-105

A moderated discussion and critique of the themes, representation, development, marketing, problems and solutions presented by the Tinker Bell films and media franchise. The session will start after a 10-minute intermission after the screening. Participation in the discussion is completely optional.

Documentaries, Journalism, and the Future of Reality-Based Storytelling
2014-12-05 08:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
Documentary and journalism have a complicated relationship. They share commitments to reality-based storytelling, yet have distinctive legacies and institutional histories. They share technologies, vocabularies and modes of address, yet have different notions of time, from the ‘now’ of breaking news to the ‘timeless’ status of classic documentaries. At a moment when the Internet has emerged as a platform common to print and broadcast journalism as well as new forms of interactive and participatory documentary, complication seems more like confusion. One might try to clarify the situation by disambiguating these genres, solidifying their boundaries. We seek instead to make productive use of the situation by taking advantage of their commonalities, finding ways to re-invent and re-invigorate both documentary and journalism, in the process expanding their audiences and enhancing their relevance. Documentaries have demonstrated the advantages of synergistic thinking, finding a new place and new publics through digital journalism portals. But what can new forms of documentary contribute back to journalism? To answer that question, we have to think critically and creatively about the affordances of these different traditions in light of their new ecosystem.

Raney Aronson – Executive Producer, FRONTLINE
Francesca Panetta – The Guardian Multimedia Special Projects Editor
Katerina Cizek – National Film Board of Canada, documentary director
Jason Spingarn-Kopf – New York Times Op-Docs Editor
Moderator: William Uricchio – MIT

Making Computing Strange: Cultural Analytics and Phantasmal Media
2014-12-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lev Manovich, the author of the seminal The Language of New Media, MIT’s Fox Harrell, who recently published Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, and MIT’s Nick Montfort will examine the ways in which computational models can be used in cultural contexts for everything from analyzing media to imagining new ways to represent ourselves.

Online Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2014-11-21 15:00 - 17:00
Join us at 3pm on November 21, here at cmsw.mit.edu! (What time is that where you live?)
JOIN NOW!
It may help to prepare some questions ahead of time. It’s as simple as scanning through the basic info about the graduate program: cmsw.mit.edu/education/comparative-media-studies/masters.

Town Meeting
2014-11-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Open to the CMS/W family only, the annual town meeting is a discussion among the program’s community members and directors.

On-campus Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2014-11-20 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Registration required at Eventbrite.
We will be experimenting with livestreaming this event via Ustream.tv. Tune in to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cms-graduate-information-session at 1:00 pm! We’ll have the comments open so that remote “attendees” can send in questions as we go along.
This event will have ASL translators present, so will be accessible to the Deaf community.

Online Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2014-10-24 09:00 - 11:00
Join us at 9am on October 24th, here at cmsw.mit.edu! (What time is that where you live?)
JOIN NOW!
RSVP is not required for online information sessions, though you can sign up for a reminder below.
It may help to prepare some questions ahead of time. It’s as simple as scanning through the basic info about the graduate program: cmsw.mit.edu/education/comparative-media-studies/masters.

CMS Alumni Panel
2014-10-23 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Three Comparative Media Studies alums return to discuss their post-graduate lives.
Sam Ford, S.M., ’07
Sam Ford is Director of Audience Engagement at strategic communication and marketing firm Peppercomm. He is co-author of the 2013 book Spreadable Media and co-editor of the 2011 book The Survival of Soap Opera. Sam is a contributing author to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Inc.; a research affiliate with MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing; and an instructor with Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program. Sam currently serves as Co-Chair of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Ethics Committee. He has recently published work with The Journal of Fandom Studies, Panorama Social, Cinema Journal, The Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Advertising Age, PRWeek, PR News, O’Dwyer PR, IABC Communication World, The Public Relations Strategist, PropertyCasualty360, Oxford University Press Bibliographies, and the NYU Press book, Making Media Work, among other outlets. He’s based in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Rekha Murthy, S.M., ’05
Rekha Murthy is Director of Projects + Partnerships at PRX, where she finds innovative ways for public media stations and producers to reach audiences and earn revenue. Rekha runs PRX’s digital distribution program, where she forges new, non-broadcast pathways for audio works. These range from established channels like iTunes and Amazon, to aggregators like TuneIn and Stitcher, to entertainment and education services large and small.
As part of PRX’s award-winning Apps team, Rekha has set new standards for public media’s mobile strategy and adoption with apps including the Public Radio Player, This American Life, and for major stations. She launched PRX’s iTunes distribution service, making independent productions and major national programs available for sale in the iTunes Store.
Rekha advises various transmedia initiatives for public media and served on the board of the Integrated Media Association (now part of Greater Public).
Before PRX, Rekha was a producer for NPR’s All Things Considered and an editor of NPR.org. She’s been a project manager and user experience designer for web and mobile clients.
Parmesh Shahani, S.M., ’05
Parmesh Shahani, listed in 2012 as one of 25 Indians to watch out for by Financial Times, is the head of the Godrej India Culture Lab — an experimental idea-space that cross-pollinates the best ideas and people working on India from across the academic, creative and corporate worlds to explore what it means to be modern and Indian. In addition, Parmesh also serves as the Editor-at-large for Verve magazine, India. He is a Yale World Fellow, currently spending a semester in New Haven. He is also a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, TED Fellow, and a Utrecht University-Impakt Fellow. Parmesh’s masters’ thesis at CMS was released as a book “Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India” by Sage Publications in 2008. You can follow Parmesh on Twitter at @parmeshs.

On-campus Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2014-10-23 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Registration required at Eventbrite.

Doris Sommer, "Welcome Back, to the Humanities as Civic Engagement"
2014-10-16 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Doris Sommer. Staff Photo, Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University News Office
Doris Sommer’s new book, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, revives the collaboration between aesthetic philosophy and democratic development. From the top and from below, creative projects and their interpretation fuel positive change and renew humanists’ opportunities to make civic contributions.
Sommer is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative.

Documentaries, Journalism, and the Future of Reality-Based Storytelling
2014-10-09 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Documentary and journalism have a complicated relationship. They share commitments to reality-based storytelling, yet have distinctive legacies and institutional histories. They share technologies, vocabularies and modes of address, yet have different notions of time, from the ‘now’ of breaking news to the ‘timeless’ status of classic documentaries. At a moment when the Internet has emerged as a platform common to print and broadcast journalism as well as new forms of interactive and participatory documentary, complication seems more like confusion. One might try to clarify the situation by disambiguating these genres, solidifying their boundaries. We seek instead to make productive use of the situation by taking advantage of their commonalities, finding ways to re-invent and re-invigorate both documentary and journalism, in the process expanding their audiences and enhancing their relevance. Documentaries have demonstrated the advantages of synergistic thinking, finding a new place and new publics through digital journalism portals. But what can new forms of documentary contribute back to journalism? To answer that question, we have to think critically and creatively about the affordances of these different traditions in light of their new ecosystem.

Raney Aronson, deputy executive producer, FRONTLINE
Katerina Cizek, documentary director, National Film Board of Canada
Jason Spingarn-Koff, New York Times Op-Docs editor
Francesca Panetta, Guardian multimedia special projects editor
Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT

Helen Nissenbaum, "Resisting Data’s Tyranny with Obfuscation"
2014-10-02 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Helen Nissenbaum
Against inexorable machinations of data surveillance, analysis, and profiling, data obfuscation holds promise of relief. Whether it can withstand countervailing analytics is an intriguing question; whether it is unethical, illegitimate, or, at best, ungenerous cuts close to the bone. Yet, as NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum will argue in this talk, obfuscation is a compelling “weapon-of-the-weak,” which deserves to be developed and strengthened, its moral challenges countered and mitigated.
Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her work spans social, ethical, and political dimensions of information technology and digital media. She has written and edited five books, including Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (forthcoming from MIT Press, 2014) and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford University Press, 2010) and her research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.
Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Caetlin Benson-Allott, "By Design: Or, What Remote Controls Can Teach Us about the Nature of Control"
2014-09-25 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caetlin Benson-Allott
Co-sponsored with MIT Literature.
How does an object set the limits for human experiences of will and subjecthood? How does an interface temper our desires for interactivity or intervention? A remote control appears to exert its user’s will over distant objects, yet the design and function of the device itself instill in its subject a vexed relationship to his or her own agency. Analyzing the technical and design evolution of these devices reveals how the seemingly most inconsequential of media devices have shaped the way users cohabit with mass media, consumer electronics, and each other.
Caetlin Benson-Allott is Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) and Remote Control (New York: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2015). Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Film Criticism, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video as well as multiple anthologies.
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Philip Napoli, "Media Impact Assessment and Beyond: Thoughts on the Treacherous Task of Quantifying Journalistic Performance"
2014-09-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Philip Napoli, Rutgers University
In recent years, a variety of funders have begun to invest substantially in efforts to assess the impact of media initiatives such as documentary films and journalism ventures. These efforts reflect a fundamental shift in how media performance is assessed (and whose assessments matter) in an environment of extreme audience fragmentation and increased challenges to monetizing media content. This presentation will focus on ongoing research that seeks to define and assess the field of media impact assessment. In addressing these issues, this analysis seeks to:

identify important points of distinction between contemporary notions of media impact and more traditional notions of media effects;
assess the methods and metrics being employed to assess media impact;
identify the key challenges and tensions inherent in such efforts.

This presentation also will illustrate that impact represents only one of a number of aspects of journalistic performance that are being converted to quantitative performance metrics. Related areas of ongoing research include efforts to assess the health of local media ecosystems and the quality of journalistic content. The broader implications of this wide-ranging transformation in how journalistic performance may be assessed will be considered.
Philip M. Napoli (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Professor of Journalism & Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University, where he leads the Media and the Public Interest Initiative. His current research projects include an analysis of the functioning of the New York City information ecosystem during and after Hurricane Sandy (funded by Internews) and the News Measures Research Project (funded by the Democracy Fund and the Dodge Foundation).

Sinan Aral, "Social Influence and The Dynamics of Online Reputation"
2014-09-11 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sinan Aral
Identity and reputation drive some of the most important decisions we make online: Who to follow or link to, whose information to trust, whose opinion to rely on when choosing a product or service, whose content to consume and share. Yet, we know very little about the dynamics of online reputation and how it affects our decision making.
The MIT Sloan School of Management’s Sinan Aral will describe a series of randomized experiments that explore the population level behavioral dynamics catalyzed by identity and reputation online. He will explore some of the implications for bias in online ratings, the foundations of social advertising and the ability to generate cascades of behavior through peer to peer social influence in networks. The coming decades will likely see an emphasis on verified identities online. Aral will argue that a new science of online identity could help guide our business, platform design and social policy decisions in light of the rising importance of online reputation and social influence.

Alexandre Goncalves '14: Thesis Presentation
2014-06-05 15:00 - 17:00 | MIT Building E14, Room 244, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Please join Alex Gonçalves as he presents his thesis “The Brazilian Networked Public Sphere: the Online Debate on the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet” to the public.

Scientists, Bottle Tops, and Robot Guinea Pigs: Inside the Creative Industries Prototyping Lab
2014-05-15 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building E14, Room 244, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hear what happened when six Comparative Media Studies graduate students went to Lima in April to work with some of Peru’s most promising entrepreneurs in the creative industries.
Rodrigo Davies, Erica Deahl, Julie Fischer, Jason Lipshin, Eduardo Marisca, and Lingyuxiu Zhong facilitated a series of collaborative and interdisciplinary lectures, workshops and design sessions, leading participants through the potentials and challenges of working in the digital creative industries. Through a process of critical technology design, the workshop produced prototypes of tools, media and processes that allow groups and communities to share creative visions — and helped participants develop the knowledge and skills they need to build audiences, make an impact on social issues, and develop sustainable creative ventures.
The projects were presented at a public event at Peru’s Ministry of Culture, and the group hosted a panel at the HASTAC 2014 conference, which was held outside the US for the first time this year.
We’ll be sharing the projects, our insights on the process and plans for the future. Join us!

Philip Jones: "Gaming in Color"
2014-05-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Philip Jones
Gaming in Color is a full length documentary of the story of the queer gaming community, gaymer culture and events, and the rise of LGBTQ themes in video games. A lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer gamer has a higher chance of being mistreated in an online social game. Diverse queer themes in storylines and characters are still mostly an anomaly in the mainstream video game industry. Gaming In Color explores how the community culture is shifting and the industry is diversifying, helping with queer visibility and acceptance of an LGBTQ presence.
Philip Jones is a queer youth and activist, who began in the games industry with journalism and podcasting. He is now best known for his work in directing the video games documentary Gaming in Color which focuses on queer gamers. He also has a hand in other MidBoss projects, currently head of the expo hall and vendor relations for the second GaymerX convention, as well as assistant writer for upcoming adventure game Read Only Memories. When not working on these projects, he studies and wears too much flannel at his home in Texas.

Screening of "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" with director Brian Knappenberger
2014-05-02 18:30 - 21:30
Tickets required, with limited availability:
The Internet’s Own Boy follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz’s help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz’s groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron’s story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.
The Internet’s Own Boy will be available in theaters and on Demand on July 27th.
Co-hosted by Participant Media, the MIT Center for Civic Media, MIT Open Doc Lab, and the Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Tarleton Gillespie: "Algorithms, and the Production of Calculated Publics"
2014-05-01 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Tarleton Gillespie, Dept. of Communication, Cornell University; Visiting Researcher, Microsoft Research New England
Algorithms may now be our most important knowledge technologies, “the scientific instruments of a society at large,” (Gitelman) and they are increasingly vital to how we organize human social interaction, produce authoritative knowledge, and choreograph our participation in public life. Search engines, recommendation systems, edge algorithms on social networking sites, and “trend” identification algorithms: these not only help us find information, they provide a means to know what there is to know and to participate in social and political discourse. In this talk Tarleton Gillespie will highlight one particular dimension of these algorithms, their production of calculated publics: algorithmically produced snapshots of the “public” around us and what most concerns it. Understanding the calculations and motivations behind the production of these calculated publics helps highlight how these algorithms are relevant to our collective efforts to know and be known.
Tarleton Gillespie is an associate professor at Cornell University, in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science. This semester he is a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research, New England. He is the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (2014), and the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (2007), and the co-founder of the scholarly blog at culturedigitally.org.
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2014 Media Spectacle
2014-04-28 18:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Showcasing video projects created by MIT students, staff, faculty and affiliates.
Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction/Documentary, and Audience Favorite
Entry deadline: April 21
contact: bshep@mit.edu
Submit your entry and check out past winners.

Online Reading and the Future of Annotation
2014-04-24 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Using the tools of online textual annotation — the platform Rap Genius, its spinoff site Poetry Genius, or MIT’s own Annotation Studio — readers can collaborate on annotating or interpreting a work, make their annotations public, and respond to interpretations by others. We will be joined by creators, facilitators, and users of these sites to discuss how online annotation is changing practices of reading, enriching practices of teaching and learning, and making newly public a previously private encounter with the written word. MIT’s Noel Jackson will moderate.
Wyn Kelley is a senior lecturer in Literature. She has worked for many years with the MIT’s digital humanities lab, HyperStudio, and is the author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) among other works.
Kurt Fendt is Director of HyperStudio, MIT’s Center for Digital Humanities. HyperStudio explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of research and education.
Jeremy Dean, AKA Lucky_Desperado, is the "Education Czar" at Rap Genius, an online database of song lyrics (and poetry on the spinoff site Poetry Genius) that users can annotate freely.
Noel Jackson is a Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (2008).

New Histories of the South Asian Diaspora
2014-04-16 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 325, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT-India & the Harvard South Asia Institute present the inaugural event of a new series, “South Asia and Its Diasporas”
Coolie Woman/Bengali Harlem: New Histories of the South Asian Diaspora
A Reading and Discussion with authors Gaiutra Bahadur & Vivek Bald
Moderated by Walter Johnson
In 1903, a young woman named Sujaria and a young man named Abdul Aziz left the port of Calcutta in separate ships, sailing westward. Sujaria was pregnant and alone; she and the others on her ship were indentured laborers, headed to sugar plantations in the British colony of Guiana. Abdul Aziz was a peddler of chikon embroidery from a village in Hooghly; he traveled with three other young men, all headed for the beach boardwalks of New Jersey, and ultimately, the neighborhood of Tremé in New Orleans, aiming to sell goods and send money home. What happened to Sujaria and Abdul? What kind of lives did they lead after emigrating from colonial India? And what other experiences, like theirs, have been “lost” in previous accounts of South Asia and its diasporas?
In this special joint reading and conversation, Gaiutra Bahadur, author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013, University of Chicago Press) and Vivek Bald, author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013, Harvard University Press) will present excerpts from their work and discuss their common experiences excavating and bringing to life the stories of previously unacknowledged South Asian migrants from the early 20th century. The conversation will be moderated by Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and author, most recently, of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian AmericaVivek BaldHarvard University Press, 2013
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of IndentureGaiutra BahadurUniversity of Chicago Press, 2013
Gaiutra Bahadur is a journalist, book critic, and recent Harvard Neiman Fellow whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Ms., and the Nation, among other publications. In Coolie Woman, she embarks on a journey into the past to find the story of her great-grandmother, Sujaria. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other “coolie women”, shining a light on their complex lives. Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora–from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next–that is at once a search for one’s roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
Vivek Bald is a writer, scholar, filmmaker, and Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Writing at MIT. In Bengali Harlem, he pieces together fragments of archival evidence to uncover the histories of two populations of South Asian Muslim migrants who lived, settled, and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican communities from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. The first, a group of “Oriental goods” peddlers from West Bengal, established a peddling network in the 1890s, that spread throughout the Jim Crow South and into the Caribbean. The second consisted of hundreds of steamship workers who, beginning in the 1910s, escaped British ships in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and established clandestine networks to access restaurant and factory jobs and build new lives in the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws.
Walter Johnson is a distinguished historian whose work focuses on slavery, capitalism, and imperialism in the nineteenth century United States. His award-winning first book, Soul by Soul (1999) used the slave market as a way to think about the fantasies, fears, negotiations, and violence that characterized American slavery. His second book, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Imperialism in the Mississippi Valley (2013), embeds the history of slavery in the U.S. in the histories of global capitalism – the cotton trade and the Atlantic money market – and U.S. imperialism – the Louisiana Purchase, the illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s, and the effort to reopen the Atlantic Slave trade on the eve of the Civil War.
Additional support for this event provided by MIT’s programs in Comparative Media Studies/Writing; History; Women’s and Gender Studies; Literature; and the Center for Bilingual/Bicultural Studies.

Susan Murray, "'Natural Vision vs. Tele-Vision’: Defining and Managing Electronic Color in the Post-War Era"
2014-04-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Susan Murray
The standardization of color television in the US during the postwar era was, in large part, discussed and determined in relation to historical developments in color theory (philosophical, psychological, and physical), colorimetry, color design and industry, psychophysics, psychology and, of course, what had already been established industrially, culturally, and technically for monochrome television. In this presentation, Susan Murray explores how these various threads of scientific, aesthetic, philosophical, and industrial knowledge were built into the standards, processes, and procedures for and around the technology and use of color television from the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. This presentation will be less about color programming itself, and more about the discourses that framed and managed color use and reception not only in the standardization period, but also during RCA and NBC’s early attempts to sell color to consumers, sponsors, and critics.
Susan Murray is associate professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. She is the author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars! Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (2005) and the coeditor (with Laurie Ouellette) of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2004, 2009). She has received fellowships from the ACLS and NYU’s Humanities Initiative for 2013-14 and is currently writing a history of color television from 1929-1970, which is under contract with Duke University Press.
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Comparative Media Studies Thesis Day
2014-04-04 10:00 - 17:00 | MIT Student Center Room 407, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Join CMS/W for thesis presentations by students in the Comparative Media Studies masters program. Free and open to the public.

10:00-10:30 Coffee and Conversation

10:30 Presentations by:

Lingyuxiu Zhong “My Pins are My Dreams: Pinterest, Collective Daydreams, and the Aspirational Gap”
Eduardo Marisca Alvarez “Playful Ventures: Technology Entrepreneurship and Peripheral Innovation in the Peruvian Game Industry”
Julie Fischer “Creat[e L]ive Treatment of Actuality: Live Documentary Practices for the Rise of Real Time”

12:30 Lunch Break

1:30 Presentations by:

Rodrigo Davies “Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place”
Denise Cheng “The Future of Work: Blueprints for a Worker Support Infrastructure in the Peer Economy”
Erica Deahl “Better the Data You Know: Developing Youth Data Literacy in Schools and Informal Learning Environments”
Jason Lipshin “Network Design: A Theory of Scale for Ubiquitous Computing”

Science in Fiction
2014-04-03 17:15 - 19:15 | MIT Stata Center, Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hanya Yanagihara’s first book, the widely celebrated The People In The Trees, is loosely based on the life and work of Nobel Prize-winner physician and researcher D. Carleton Gajdusek. She’ll join author and physicist Alan Lightman, who was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities, to discuss the unique challenges of respecting the exacting standards of science in fictional texts. Forum Co-Director Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus, will moderate.
Hanya Yanagihara is an Editor-At-Large at Conde Nast Traveler and author of The People In The Trees, a novel the New York Times called "suspenseful" and "exhaustingly inventive."
Alan Lightman is currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and author of the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams. His most recent novel, Mr g, was published in January 2012.
Seth Mnookin is Co-Director of the Communications Forum and Associate Director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book is The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.
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Barry Werth and The Antidote: Reporting from Inside the World of Big Pharma
2014-03-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Journalist and author Barry Werth has been writing about the business and practice of the pharmaceutical industry for more than two decades. The Billion Dollar Molecule, his 1995 book on Vertex Pharmaceuticals, was named one the “75 Smartest Books We Know” by Fortune. His sixth and most recent book, The Antidote: Inside the World of Big Pharma, revisits Vertex, offering unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to a company that that went from cash-starved startup to a triumph of American bio-tech innovation. Werth has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Technology Review, among many others publications.

Kate Crawford, "Squeaky Dolphin to Normcore: Anxiety and Big Data Culture"
2014-03-13 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Kate Crawford
Kate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (Social Media Collective), a Visiting Professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, a Senior Fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU, and an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. She researches how people engage with networked technologies, and analyze the political, cultural, legal, philosophical and policy-making implications. She has done interview-based studies in Australia, India and the US, in big cities and in very small towns. Crawford is interested in how networked data becomes part of our understanding of knowledge, privacy, democracy, intimacy and subjectivity. Her first book Adult Themes was through Pan Macmillan, and she is currently working on a new book.

Henry Jenkins Returns
2014-03-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 370, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Legendary former MIT professor and housemaster Henry Jenkins, now the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, returns to the Forum for a conversation about his time at the Institute and the founding of CMS as well as his path-breaking scholarship on contemporary media. Forum Director David Thorburn, Jenkins’ longtime friend and colleague, will moderate the discussion.
Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He taught at MIT from 1990-2009 and was the founding director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Institute. He has written many books on film, popular culture and media, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008).
David Thorburn is a professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. He is the author of a critical study of the novelist Joseph Conrad and many essays on literature and media. Among his publications: Rethinking Media Change (2007), co-edited with Henry Jenkins.

Meredith Schweig and Rebecca Dirksen: "Taiwanese Rap and Haitian Music and Reconstruction"
2014-02-27 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Meredith Schweig
In this presentation, Meredith Schweig explores the gender politics and practices of the Taiwan rap scene. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with the island’s hip-hop community and invoking emergent scholarly discourses on East Asian and global masculinities, she argues that rap’s identity as men’s music renders it a productive site for exploring, unsettling, and transforming prevailing models of Taiwanese manhood. In the context of shifting gender roles driven by dramatic social, political, and economic change over the course of the last three decades in Taiwan, Schweig considers how rap has created new spaces for male sociality, avenues for male self-empowerment, and opportunities for the articulation of multiple masculine identities not otherwise audible in the island’s popular music.
Schweig is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century music of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on popular song, narrativity, and cultural politics in Taiwan and China. She has received fellowships and grants from the Asian Cultural Council, Whiting Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.

Rebecca Dirksen
In Haiti from the colonial period to the present, music has been a critical means for public dialogue when other avenues have not been possible. Mizik angaje, literally, “engaged music,” a genre-crossing expressive form featuring pointed lyrical commentary on political and social issues, has accompanied key moments in Haitian history, from the Haitian Revolution to the downfall of the Duvalier regime and subsequent rise of Aristide to power. Increasingly in recent years, mizik angaje has been re-imagined to reflect current realities: any understanding of this musical phenomenon must now go beyondexamining how ordinary Haitian citizens use musical dialogue to critique infrastructural weaknesses and abuses of authority to demonstrating how a growing number of social groups employ music as an explicit and fundamental tool for strengthening their local communities. Independent of state or NGO support, these groups are tackling non-musical neighborhood concerns by promoting social programs that simultaneously entertain music-making and community service. This leads us to ask, what happens when Haitian musicians implicate themselves in the processes of development?
Rebecca Dirksen, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed her PhD in ethnomusicology at UCLA in 2012. Her primary research concerns music and grassroots development in Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake. Concurrent projects revolve around creative responses to crisis and disaster, intangible cultural heritage protection, cultural policy, and Haitian classical music.
This event is co-sponsored with MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Cool Japan Project.
