Mit Cms/w

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 thei

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

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

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 direct

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 constitu

This talk discusses 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 argues that the best way to understand the immense influence of this relatively small business is through a political economic analysis. Specifically, she discusses 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.

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 year

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 t

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 covers 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

The Amazon is burning. Coral reefs are dying. Glaciers are melting, and as Earth gets pushed to its brink, journalists who can translate the impact of climate change and hold the powerful accountable are more needed than ever. Climate reporters Kendra Pierre-Louis (New York Times) and Lisa Song (ProPublica) head to the MIT Communications Forum to discuss the media’s role in illuminating environmental issues, promoting environmental justice and ethics, and the future of climate journalism. Beth Daley, Editor and General Manager for The Conversation, will moderate.

An important part of the work done at the The Education Arcade is based on a process of Design Based Research (DBR). In DBR, we design products that are meant to fill real classroom needs and then iteratively test and refine them. Eric Klopfer and The Education Arcade are currently working on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games. During this talk, attendees got a chance to play a couple of these games and participate in a design discussion with one of the games that is currently in progress. Professor Klopfer, currently Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. He is also a co-faculty director for MIT’s J-WEL World Education Lab.

In June of 2018, following a campaign initiated by activist employees within the company, Google announced its intention not to renew a US Defense Department contract for Project Maven, an initiative to automate the identification of military targets based on drone video footage. Defendants of the program argued that that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of US drone operations, not least by enabling more accurate recognition of those who are the program’s legitimate targets and, by implication, sparing the lives of noncombatants. But this promise begs a more fundamental question: What relations of reciprocal familiarity does recognition presuppose? And in the absence of those relations, what schemas of categorization inform our readings of the Other? The focus of a growing body of scholarship, this question haunts not only US military operations but an expanding array of technologies of social sorting. Understood as apparatuses of recognition (Barad 2007: 171), Project Maven and the US progr

Co-Creation is picking up steam as a claim, aspiration, and buzz-word du jour. But what is and why does it matter? Drawing on a just-released field study, Collective Wisdom, this session addresses those questions and explore the method’s implications for just and equitable creation. It considers co-creation in the arts with communities, across disciplines and organizations, and with non-humans (both biological and AI systems), calling out precedents and best practices in a broad array of communities, including historically marginalized groups. What are the trends, opportunities, and challenges bound up in co-creation and its various deployments, and why it is increasingly urgent in our time? William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He, together with Katerina Cizek, authored Collective Wisdom — a field study on co-creation. His current research con

Vivek Bald, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media, reads from a new essay that uses a teenage encounter with police and the justice system to explore questions of immigrant acceptability, racialization, and the South Asians American embrace of model minority status. He also provides an update on his documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem, recently funded by the PBS-affiliated Center for Asian American Media, and currently being edited by Comparative Media Studies master’s alum, Beyza Boyacioglu. Between the essay and film, Bald reflects on South Asian American experiences of multi-racial identity and histories of cross-racial community-making. Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The

Around the world, citizens are saying the system is broken. If it’s education and schools one day, it’s healthcare the next. Our trust in politics and public institutions is falling globally, and our confidence in the ability to solve problems around us is teetering. Can entertainment and pop culture be a way out? Can films, television shows, and digital content become spaces to teach us how to fix our systems? Can we create influential media that changes how we talk about identity, social justice, public institutions, and citizen power? In this talk, Anushka Shah, founder of the production house Civic Studios and the Civic Entertainment project at the MIT Media Lab, explores how entertainment can provide alternate narratives of citizen participation. Shah’s Civic Entertainment project explores the intersection of civic participation with film, television, radio, theatre and digital entertainment. The project focuses on researching the media effects of fiction towards thought and behavior change, explores

Computer programming is a general-purpose way of using computation. It can be instrumental (oriented toward a predefined end, as with the development of well-specified apps and Web services) or exploratory (used for artistic work and intellectual inquiry). Professor Nick Monfort’s emphasis in this talk, as in his own work, is on exploratory programming, that type of programming which can be used as part of a creative or scholarly methodology. He says a bit about his own work but uses much of the discussion to survey how many other poet/programmers, artist/programmers, and scholar/programmers are creating radical new work and uncovering new insights. Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Recent books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press) and several books of computational poetry: Hard West Turn, The Truelis

While the appeal of games may be universal and satisfy our innate desire to play, the powerful dynamics that govern our behavior within games is even more interesting than the play itself. Can we broaden our understanding of play mechanisms by applying the subliminal mechanics of play beyond games? In this episode, Christopher Weaver, Founder of Bethesda Softworks and who teaches engineering and computational media respectively at MIT and Wesleyan, explores these important issues in a lecture entitled “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”. Prof. Weaver discusses how games work and why they are such potent tools in areas as disparate as military simulation, childhood education, and medicine. Christopher Weaver is Research Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Comparative Media Studies, Visiting Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Microphotonics Center and Distinguished Professor of Computational Media at Wesleyan University. Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry Scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earne

In 1998, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program held the first Media in Transition (MiT) conference and inaugurated a related book series. Research from that first MiT conference appeared in Democracy and New Media, Jenkins & Thorburn, eds., (MIT Press, 2003). Now, twenty years later, we are organizing the 10th iteration of the event. Much has changed over these two decades, but the theme “democracy and digital media” is as urgent as ever. Twenty years ago there was no Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix. iPhones and Samsung Galaxies had not yet hit the shelves. And Siri and Alexa were still in development. Since 1998, media have undergone major transition. We have witnessed a shift from Napster to Spotify, from Web 1.0 to 2.0, from CU-SeeMe to Twitch TV, and beyond. We have experienced the rise of social media, civic media, algorithmic cultures, and have seen ever greater concentration of media ownership. The events of 9/11 catalyzed intensified state surveillance and privatized security using various media techn

In 1998, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program held the first Media in Transition (MiT) conference and inaugurated a related book series. Research from that first MiT conference appeared in Democracy and New Media, Jenkins & Thorburn, eds., (MIT Press, 2003). Now, twenty years later, we are organizing the 10th iteration of the event. Much has changed over these two decades, but the theme “democracy and digital media” is as urgent as ever. Twenty years ago there was no Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix. iPhones and Samsung Galaxies had not yet hit the shelves. And Siri and Alexa were still in development. Since 1998, media have undergone major transition. We have witnessed a shift from Napster to Spotify, from Web 1.0 to 2.0, from CU-SeeMe to Twitch TV, and beyond. We have experienced the rise of social media, civic media, algorithmic cultures, and have seen ever greater concentration of media ownership. The events of 9/11 catalyzed intensified state surveillance and privatized security using various media techn

Plenary 1: Culture Industries by Massachusetts Institute of Technology