PODCAST · education
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
by Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Featuring a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices.You can learn more about us, including info about our faculty and academic programs and how to join us in person for events, at cmsw.mit.edu.
Episodes
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A Reading with Poet Laureate Arthur Sze
This reading, part of MIT’s William Corbett Poetry Series, welcomes former U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze back to the campus where he began his literary journey. Introduced by Chloe Garcia Roberts and Nick Montfort, the event reflects on poetry’s enduring place at MIT and its power to shape lives...
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"Pomegranate" reading and discussion, with the book's author Helen Elaine Lee
The acclaimed author of "The Serpent’s Gift", Helen Elaine Lee, returns with this poetic and powerful journey of healing and autonomy. About the Book As she wraps up her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center, Ranita Atwater is determined to stay clean and…
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Bernard Geoghegan, “Learning to Code: From Information Theory to French Theory”
How and why, in the latter half of the twentieth century, did informatic theories of “code” developed around cybernetics and information theory take root in research settings as varied as Palo Alto family therapy, Parisian semiotics, and new-fangled cultural theories ascendant at US liberal arts...
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Francesca Bolla Tripodi, “The Propagandists’ Playbook”
The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so effective and pervasive, while also humanizing the people whose worldviews and media practices...
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Lupe Fiasco presents “Rap Theory & Practice: an Introduction”
An exploration into the underlying fundamental functions, structures, and principles of rap. Open to the public, the talk was hosted at MIT on November 30, 2022. Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer…
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Resilient Witnessing In The Face Of Human Rights Abuses, Distrust, And Deepfakes
Sam Gregory is Director of Programs, Strategy & Innovation at WITNESS, which helps people use video and technology to protect human rights; studies relationship between emergent technologies, disinformation, media manipulation, & authoritarianism.
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The Forensic Citizen Learning From The Past, Preparing For The Future
William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which brings together storytellers, technologists, and scholars to experiment with new documentary.
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The Long & Ambiguous (pre)history Of Audiovisual In The Black Experience
Full title: “Between freedom & oppression: The long & ambiguous (pre)history of audiovisual in the Black experience” Featuring Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Ekene Mekwunye, Jepchumba, and Russel Hlongwane. Chakanetsa Mavhunga is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute…
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The Whole World Is Watching How 1968 Helps Us Frame The Present
Professor Heather Hendershot's opening plenary from the "Bearing Witness, Seeking Justice" conference, with initial remarks by Dean Agustín Rayo and Tracie Jones, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She studies…
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Moving Images In Absentia Courtroom Looking In The Age Of Hyper - Mediation
Kelli Moore is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who examines how media and technology produce legal and political knowledge to inform public debates on visual literacy, race, and other issues.
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Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, “Seeing Silicon Valley”
Video also available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-seeing-silicon-valley-mary-beth-meehan-fred-turner. Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley historian and media scholar Fred Turner discuss their recently published and award-winning book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a...
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Charles North - The William Corbett Poetry Series 01
Charles North has published twelve books of poems, three books of critical prose, and collaborations with artists and other poets. With James Schuyler, he edited the poet/painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway 2. His New and Selected Poems What It Is Like (2011) headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books…
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Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech
In her 2021 book Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, our guest Martha Minow “outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the...
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Oscar Winberg, "Archie Bunker Goes to Washington"
This talk reconsiders the role of television entertainment in American political life in the 1970s and beyond. Focusing on the situation comedy All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), the talk looks at a turn to politics in entertainment and a turn to entertainment in politics. In the 1970s, fictive...
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Jens Pohlmann, "Platform Regulation and the Digital Public Sphere"
In this talk, Jens Pohlmann compares the discourse about the regulation of social media platforms and its effect on freedom of expression in Germany and the United States. Drawing on computational methods, he analyzes the discussion about a German anti-hate speech law called the Network…
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“Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air”, Six Muslim Women in STEM
These six poets met as undergrads at MIT, brought together by the many things they shared: the challenges of being women in STEM, their lifelong pursuits of becoming better Muslims, and the exhaustion of drinking from the academic firehose. Through sharing their poetry, they want to foster…
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Racquel Gates, “Reintroducing Melvin Van Peebles”
In this talk, Racquel Gates presents her experience working as consulting producer on the Criterion release of Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films. A legendary filmmaker whose unique personality is just as well-known as his body of work, Van Peebles made an indelible impact on both Black film and...
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Katherine Jewell, "Party City: WMBR, Institutional Change, and Democratic Media"
College radio has long been known as the weird, wacky signals on the left of the FM dial offering music that would never be mainstream. But this wasn’t always the case—and moreover, even at stations exemplifying musical adventurousness and the community potential of college signals, institutional...
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David Thorburn: William Corbett Poetry Series
David Thorburn has been a teacher of literature for 57 years, 46 of them at MIT where he is Professor of Literature and Comparative Media and Director Emeritus of the MIT Communications Forum. Generations of MIT undergraduates have taken his lecture course, “The Film Experience,” which now…
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Jorge Caraballo, “How to Use Audio Storytelling to Cultivate a Community and Keep it Engaged”
Podcasts are in a golden age and are being used to effectively communicate new ideas, tell compelling stories, and build highly participative communities. This presentation will explore the power of audio storytelling to connect individuals in engaged networks of collaboration. Jorge Caraballo…
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Eric Freedman, "Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans"
Video game engines have promoted a new cultural economy for software production and have provided a common architecture for digital content creation across what were once distinct media verticals—film, television, video games and other immersive and interactive media forms that can leverage...
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Lynn Nottage’s "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark" and the Making of Black Women’s Film History
Lynn Nottage’s 2011 satirical play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood’s golden age. Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, was inspired in part by the career of...
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Uplifting Us: Design Opportunities in Centering Racialized Experiences in Games
Transcript and video available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-alexandra-to-design-opportunities-centering-racialized-experiences-game. People of color have always been present in games as designers, developers, players, and critics. As Kishonna Gray further expounds, gaming is a site for…
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Craig Robertson, “The Filing Cabinet and the Gendering of Information Work”
In this talk, Craig Robertson provides a brief overview of the some of the themes of his recent book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minnesota, 2021). He argues the emergence of the filing cabinet illustrates an important moment in the genealogy of the ascendance of modern...
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Graphic Materiality, Trauma, and Expressionist Comics: Artist’s Talk With Leela Corman
Graphic novel creator Leela Corman talk's and Q&A about her graphic novels and short comics on the topics of generational and personal trauma, New York City history, Polish-Jewish life, and amateur women’s wrestling. Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic novel creator. Her books include...
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Edward Schiappa, "The Transgender Exigency: The Role of Media Representation"
This presentation defines the phrase “transgender exigency” as a situation marked by an urgent need; in this case, the need to address the political and definitional challenges evinced by the need for transgender rights. The presentation provides evidence for substantial prejudice against...
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Memorial Colloquium for Professor Jing Wang
Video and transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-memorial-colloquium-in-honor-of-jing-wang ====== Professor Jing Wang — a beloved longtime colleague, vocal supporter of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and mentor to countless students and fellow faculty — passed away at age 71 this...
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Nick Thurston, "Document Practices: The Art of Propagating Access"
This talk introduces arguments and examples from Nick Thurston’s current book project, Document Practices, which explores aesthetic and political frameworks for analyzing acts of re-publishing already public documents. With case studies that range from shadow libraries to experimental videos, and...
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Educated Viewers: Civic Spectatorship, Media Literacy, and American Schools
In this talk, Victoria Cain provides a brief overview of some of the themes of her new book, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History, and a deeper dive into a few defining experiments with educational media in twentieth century US schools. Her talk will focus on the struggle of successive...
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Sulafa Zidani, “Messy on the Inside: Internet Memes as Mapping Tools of Everyday Life”
With the proliferation of social media, internet memes have become a ubiquitous part of everyday communication. However, the power of memes cannot be fully understood without considering their role in the complex relationship between technology, space, and politics. This talk will conceptualize...
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Sandra Rodriguez, "Creating and Interacting with Virtual Entities"
Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-sandra-rodriguez-creating-interacting-virtual-entities-vr-ai-human-experiences/ Drawing from recent creative experiences Chomsky vs Chomsky (Sundance 2021) and Future Rites (Creative XR, UK-Can Immersive Exchange, Philharmonia, IDFA DocLab Forum),...
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Jonathan Sterne, "Diminished Vocalities: On Prostheses and Abilities"
Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-jonathan-sterne-diminished-vocalities-on-prostheses-and-abilities/ In this talk, Jonathan Sterne provides a brief overview of some of the themes of his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, December 2021) and…
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Promotional Narratives, Science Fiction, and the Case for Mars Colonization
Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-james-wynn-promotional-narratives-mars-colonization. Given the enormous impact that colonialism has had, and continues to have, in the United States, scholars frequently look to our colonial past to understand the American present. This focus on the...
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Measuring Equity-Promoting Behaviors in Digital Teaching Simulations: A Topic Modeling Approach
Digital simulations offer learning opportunities to engage and reflect on systemic issues of racism and structural violence against communities of color. This talk examines how natural language processing tools can be used to better understand participants’ experiences within simulated…
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Charisse L’Pree: "What is a Media Psychography? A 20-year Methodological Journey"
What is your relationship with media technologies? When we say things like “I love television,” “I hate the internet,” or “I can’t live without music, ” we implicitly answer this question without explicitly asking it. In her new book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love...
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Reworking the Archive: The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project
What are some unexplored ways that online environments can help us rethink “the archive”? How might i-doc storytelling tools expand what an archive can be as well as public engagement with history itself? This presentation explores these questions through a demonstration of the online Southeast...
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#BlackInTheIvory: Academia’s Role in Institutional Racism
https://commforum.mit.edu/blackintheivory-academias-role-in-institutional-racism-96af14c37f5f For many Black scientists and researchers, working in academia means weathering systemic bias, micro-aggressions, and isolation. Dr. Shardé M. Davis, a communications researcher at the University of...
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BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail
In 2018, the United States enacted a “zero tolerance” policy which criminalized the act of seeking asylum. In June 2019, the inhumane conditions in detention camps across the border were revealed, and several weeks later the BORDERx project was established. BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail is…
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Beyond the Living Dead: Treasures from the George A. Romero Archive
Warning: contains spoilers and strong language. With his 1968 debut Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero helped to inaugurate a new era of both horror film and independent cinema, and introduced the world to the zombie as we know it today: re-animated corpses, stumbling towards the living…
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Patricia Saulis, “Two-Eyed Seeing in Environmental Justice and Media”
Two-eyed seeing has been a contemporary concept by two Indigenous Mikmaq Elders in Cape Breton Canada. Through the use of Indigenous Oral Tradition, Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Dr. Murdena Marshall have participated in many recordings of their concept and teachings. Their appearances at...
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Lana Swartz, "New Money: How Payment Became Social Media"
Lana Swartz, ’09, is joined by Aswin Punathambekar, ’03, to discuss Swartz’s new book New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale University Press). New Money frames money as a media technology, one in major transition, and interrogates the consequences of those changes. Lana Swartz is an...
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Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media
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,...
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Race and Representation of Syrian, Palestinian, and Norwegian Refugees in the News
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...
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Eric Gordon, "Towards a Meaningfully Inefficient Smart City"
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…
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Jing Wang, "Walking Around Obstacles: Nonconfrontational Activists In Gray China"
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,...
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Justin Reich, "Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education"
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...
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Kishonna Gray, "Exploring the Black Cultural Production of Gamers in Transmediated Culture"
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...
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Shawna Kidman: "The Infrastructure of the U.S. Comic Book Industry"
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...
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Marina Bers, “Coding in Early Childhood: Storytelling or Puzzle Solving?”
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...
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Desmond Upton Patton: “Contextual Analysis of Social Media”
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…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Featuring a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices.You can learn more about us, including info about our faculty and academic programs and how to join us in person for events, at cmsw.mit.edu.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing currently has 408 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Featuring a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices.You can learn more about us, including...
How often does MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing release new episodes?
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing publishes regularly with 408 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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