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 “resistance, activism, and mobilization among marginalized users.” In this talk Alexandra To describes some of the game design opportunities present in centering the experiences of people of color from the beginning through the lens of 1) a design process that focuses on the creation of joyful counterspaces, 2) game design choices that embed encountering and processing racial trauma, and 3) exploring the work that players of color are actively engaging in to create custom content that represents them where it may not exist. Through these projects we can begin to articulate an agenda for racially inclusive game design.

Alexandra To is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University jointly appointed in the Art + Design (Games) department in the College of Art, Media, and Design and the Khoury College of Computer Science. Her core research interests are in studying and designing social technologies to empower people in marginalized contexts. She uses qualitative methods to gather counterstories and participatory methods to design for the future. She additionally has extensive experience leading teams of educational game designers and has designed award-winning games. She has received multiple ACM Best Paper awards and published at CHI, UIST, CSCW, CHI Play, ToDiGRA, and DIS. Alexandra is a racial justice activist, a critical race scholar, game designer. She received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University as well as a B.S. and M.S. in Symbolic Systems with a minor in Asian American Studies from Stanford University.

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Uplifting Us: Design Opportunities in Centering Racialized Experiences in Games

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 real-time 3D visualization. Game engines are the building blocks for efficient real-time visualization, and they signal quite forcefully the colonizing influence of programming. Video game engines are powering our visual futures, and engine developers that include Unity Technologies and Epic Games are rapidly iterating their products to tackle new markets, where data and visuality continue to converge. This analysis, which draws from software studies and studies of visual culture, examines a tool that is fairly new to the Epic Games arsenal—the in-development MetaHuman Creator that is part of Epic’s proprietary Unreal Engine. The MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed application that draws from a library of real scans of people and allows 3D content developers to quickly create unique photorealistic fully-rigged digital humans. MetaHuman creation is a fluid of process, and the speedy transformation of character rigs and other non-binary attributes highlights the potential queerness or openness of data. Yet the ongoing push toward (hyper)realism in commercial media has birthed a visual economy which is supported by an industrial apparatus that privileges mastery over the tools of production, and where bodies and politics are often cleaved in the design process. Epic’s multiethnic, multiracial, transgender MetaHuman Creator is a design tool and not a narrative engine. Its transitions are simple and seamless, and the traces of non-binary and non-white identities are simply part of a larger color palette. These tools represent a way of seeing and knowing the world, and the representations they produce are part of hermetically-sealed and privately-held encoding processes that include a company’s original data, its application programming, its proprietary build environment and its interface. This analysis poses two interrelated questions. Are the MetaHuman Creator and similar simplified building tools democratizing the field of digital content creation? Are they fostering more diverse representations and narratives, and supporting the free play of identity in playable media?



Eric Freedman is Professor and Dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author most recently of The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture (2020), as well as Transient Images: Personal Media in Public Frameworks (2011). He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Creative Media Research and the advisory board of the Communication and Media Studies Research Network.

Eric Freedman, "Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans"

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 constraints loomed. In this talk, Katherine Jewell delves into the history of WMBR at MIT from the 1960s to the 1980s to explore how this station, with a license held by an independent non-profit corporation, built a meaningful community institution despite transformations within the university, its student body and organizations, as well as regulatory changes regarding noncommercial radio and the music industry’s shifting business model. DJs debated and embraced the democratic obligations of their signal, particularly their commitment to diversity of sound. But achieving these lofty goals often proved complicated given the need to construct a program that appealed to and served many audiences in a fluctuating radio market. Despite these limits, college radio’s history can offer much to consider in considering how to pursue democratic media and community connection in the twenty-first century.

Katherine Rye Jewell, Ph.D., is a historian writing about the history of college radio, including her forthcoming book, tentatively titled Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio from University of North Carolina Press. Her research on college radio is at the center of two additional book projects currently in progress. She is the author of Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century, published by Cambridge University Press (New York) in 2017. Her work has appeared in The American Historian, the Washington Post, among other scholarly publications. A graduate of Vanderbilt University (BA, 2001) and Boston University (MA, 2005; Ph.D., 2010), she studies the business and politics of culture. She is currently Associate Professor of History at Fitchburg State University, where she received the Fitchburg State University Faculty Research Award in 2018, and a year-long visiting fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

Katherine Jewell, "Party City: WMBR, Institutional Change, and Democratic Media"

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 empathy and mutual reciprocity for those who don’t often see someone like them within literary spaces. The poems they share at this reading focus on family, identity, and homeland—where they come from and how that shaped who they are now.

The evening’s readers were introduced by Indran Amirthanayagam, who produced a “world record” in 2020 publishing three poetry collections written in three different languages. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published twenty two poetry books, including Isleño (R.I.L. Editores), Blue Window (translated by Jennifer Rathbun) (Diálogos Books), Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks.com), The Migrant States, Coconuts on Mars, The Elephants of Reckoning (winner 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize), Uncivil War, and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly (www.beltwaypoetry.com).

** Readers:

* Afeefah Khazi-Syed

* Aleena Shabbir

* Ayse Angela Guvenilir

* Maisha M. Prome

* Mariam Eman Dogar

* Marwa Abdulhai

The William Corbett Poetry Series

“Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air”, Six Muslim Women in STEM

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 Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the debate about a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States in different media environments (IT-blogs, newspapers, social media).

Ultimately, he considers the extent to which cultural, historical, and political differences between these two liberal democracies inform the present transatlantic debate about the restriction of content online and the regulation of social media platforms, as well as potential impacts on the evolving digital public sphere.

Jens Pohlmann is a Research Associate at the Centre for Media, Communication & Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2017 and focuses his research on the internet policy discourse in Germany and the United States. His first book, The Creation of an Avant-Garde Brand: Heiner Müller’s Self-Presentation in the German Public Sphere is to be published this fall.

Jens Pohlmann, "Platform Regulation and the Digital Public Sphere"

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 characters, including Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) of All in the Family but also Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) of MAS*H and Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, became political icons. Produced by Norman Lear, All in the Family is recognized as a watershed moment in television history. And yet, Oscar Winberg argues, the show did not just change television, it transformed American politics. Recognizing the popularity of television, politicians learned how to use (and abuse) television entertainment to win votes, to fundraise, to promote their agenda, and to push for legislation. Television entertainment in the 1970s thereby remade political life in its image, paving the way for our current moment of mediated showbiz politics.

Oscar Winberg holds a Ph.D. in History from Åbo Akademi University. He is working on a political history of television entertainment in the 1970s United States. His work focuses on mass media in modern political history and has appeared in PS: Political Science & Politics, European Journal of American Studies, and Finsk Tidskrift. He is a columnist for Hufvudstadsbladet and has written for venues such as Made by History at the Washington Post, Vasabladet, and the public broadcasting corporation in Finland.

Oscar Winberg, "Archie Bunker Goes to Washington"

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 of the Year, and he has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards, and a Poets Foundation Award. He lives with his wife, the painter Paula North, in New York City.

Charles North - The William Corbett Poetry Series 01

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 Fraying America, a collaborative exploration of the culture of Silicon Valley — not the culture of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that we see in the press, but the lives of the men and women who inhabit the Valley and make it work. If Silicon Valley is building the world’s future, Meehan and Turner argue, then we must learn to see through the tech industry’s marketing campaigns. We need to see the kind of society the tech industry is actually creating, in its own back yard.

Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.

Mary Beth Meehan is an independent photographer, writer, and educator, who has spent more than twenty years embedding herself in communities across the United States. Beginning in her native New England, and continuing in the Midwest, the American South and in Silicon Valley, her work, which combines image, text, and large-scale public installation, stems from her belief in a collaborative process that should function in and for the communities it reflects. Co-opting the scale of celebrity and advertising, Meehan’s portrait banners activate public spaces and spark conversations among and about the people who inhabit them.

Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, “Seeing Silicon Valley”

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 television news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. Her 2022 book is "When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America", available from the University of Chicago Press: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo183630531.html

The Whole World Is Watching How 1968 Helps Us Frame The Present

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 of Technology. Mavhunga explores international history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship, with a focus on Africa.

Ekene Mekwunye is adjunct faculty at the School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, Nigeria, and an award-winning filmmaker, television producer-director, and photographer.

Jepchumba is Founder and Creative Director of African Digital Art, a collective and creative space where digital artists seek inspiration, showcase their work, and connect with emerging artists.

Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer, curator of the arts, and creative industries consultant based in Durban, South Africa. His work bridges themes of heritage, modernity, culture, and tradition across artistic disciplines.

The Long & Ambiguous (pre)history Of Audiovisual In The Black Experience

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.

The Forensic Citizen Learning From The Past, Preparing For The Future

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.

Resilient Witnessing In The Face Of Human Rights Abuses, Distrust, And Deepfakes

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.

Moving Images In Absentia Courtroom Looking In The Age Of Hyper - Mediation

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, entrepreneur, and community advocate. Rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe has released eight acclaimed studio albums, his latest being Drill Music In Zion, released in June 2022. His efforts to propagate conscious material garnered recognition as a Henry Crown Fellow, and he is a recipient of an MLK Visiting Professorship at MIT for the 2022/2023 academic year.

Rap Theory & Practice: an Introduction

Lupe Fiasco presents “Rap Theory & Practice: an Introduction”

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 conservatism embodies. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the course of the 2018 Virginia gubernatorial race-including the author’s firsthand experience of the 2017 Unite the Right rally, the book considers how Google algorithms, YouTube playlists, pundits, and politicians can manipulate audiences, reaffirm beliefs, and expose audiences to more extremist ideas, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.

Francesca Bolla Tripodi is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a a research affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute.

Francesca Bolla Tripodi, “The Propagandists’ Playbook”

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 colleges? Drawing on his recently published book “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory,” and primary sources from the MIT archives, this talk explores how far-flung technocratic exercises in Asian colonies and MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) inspired these varied and diverse audiences in a common dream of “learning to code.” The result is a new history of the ambitions behind the rise of “theory” in the US humanities, and the obscure ties of that endeavor to Progressive Era technocracy, US foundations, and the growing prestige of technology and engineering in 20th century life.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London. An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” and “humanistic” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Duke University Press recently published his book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (2023), based partly on archival research he undertook as a visiting PhD student at MIT around 2008.

Bernard Geoghegan, “Learning to Code: From Information Theory to French Theory”

Jeff VanderMeer, author of the New York Times bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), joins G. Eric Schaller, Professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth, for a broad-ranging discussion about the scientific and philosophical ideas that inspired the series. The two friends and occasional collaborators will discuss conservation science, VanderMeer’s relationship with the natural world, and the theme of extinction in “slow apocalypse” fiction, as well as the role of real-world science in science fiction. Moderator: Seth Mnookin.

The Spooky Science of the Southern Reach: An Evening with Jeff VanderMeer

International best-selling author and science historian James Gleick discusses his career, the state of science journalism, and his newest book Time Travel: A History, which delves into the evolution of time travel in literature and science and the thin line between pulp fiction and modern physics. This Communications Forum event was moderated by author and physicist Alan Lightman, the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities.

Speakers

James Gleick, author of seven books, including Chaos, Genius, and Isaac Newton, all of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize

Moderator: Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and author of 15 books

Time Traveling with James Gleick

Chris Sacca, activist investor, recently argued that Black Twitter IS Twitter. For example, African American usage of the service often dominates user metrics in the United States, despite their minority demographic numbers as computer users. This talk by André Brock unpacks Black Twitter use from two perspectives: analysis of the interface and associated practice alongside discourse analysis of Twitter’s utility and audience. Using examples of Black Twitter practice, Brock offers that Twitter’s feature set and ubiquity map closely onto Black discursive identity. Thus, Twitter’s outsized function as mechanism for cultural critique and political activism can be understood as the awakening of Black digital practice and an abridging of a digital divide.

André Brock is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Brock is one of the preeminent scholars of Black cyberculture. His work bridges Science and Technology Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, showing how the communicative affordances of online media align with those of Black communication practices. Through December 2016, he is a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England.

André Brock: "Black + Twitter: A Cultural Informatics Approach"

Nick Couldry outlined the project of his recent book, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity October 2016, co-written with Andreas Hepp). The book offers a critical reevaluation and rearticulation of the social constructivist ambitions of Berger and Luckmann’s 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality while radically rethinking the implications of this for a world saturated not just with digital media, but with data processes. Couldry outlined how a materialist phenomenology can draw not just on traditional phenomenology, but on the social theory of Norbert Elias, particularly his concept of figurations, to address the challenges of social analysis in the face of datafication. Elias, Couldry argued, is a particularly important theorist on whom to draw in making social constructivism ready to face the deep embedding of the social world with digital technologies, and more than that, to outline the challenges for social order of such a world. More broadly, Couldry argued for a reengagement of media theory with the broader tradition of social theory in the era of Big Data, in the face of a radical expansion of what media are and how mediation is embedded in everyday social orders.   

Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Lab, and during 2017-2018 a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. He is the author or editor of twelve books including most recently The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Ethics of Media (2013 Palgrave, coedited with Mirca Madianou and Amit Pinchevski), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage 2010).

The Mediated Construction of Reality - From Berger and Luckmann to Norbert Elias

Overthrown Hawaiian queens, religious zealots, swindlers, cranky cartographers, presidential assassins, and the people who visit their memorials on vacation are all fodder for historian and humorist Sarah Vowell. Vowell’s seven nonfiction books, many of which have topped the New York Times’ best sellers list, explore America’s not-so-squeaky-clean past and creates a framework for understanding our modern day values. Vowell brings her wit to the MIT Communications Forum for a moderated discussion with MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing director Seth Mnookin on what makes the past so funny, the connections between historical research and modern journalism, and much more.

Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for public radio’s This American Lifeand has written for Time, Esquire, GQ, Spin, Salon, McSweeneys, The Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of seven books including Assassination Vacation, Take the Cannoli, and The Partly Cloudy Patriot. She lives in New York City.

Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the MIT Communications Forum and director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the “Science in Society” award from the National Association of Science Writers.

DeFlorez Fund for HumorThis event is sponsored by the MIT de Florez Fund for Humor and is free for the MIT community and the general public.

An Evening with Sarah Vowell

An MIT Communications Forum: https://commforum.mit.edu/neurodiversity-at-mit-and-design-for-everyone-march-1-2018-f7886ba92b61

The world is a neurologically diverse place, but the resources, workspaces and technologies we use often don’t reflect that. Sometimes simple changes can significantly expand accessibility to people who have neurological differences like autism, dyslexia, ADHD, or epilepsy, but designers and policymakers frequently aren’t aware of issues affecting this neurodiverse community. Rosalind Picard, director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, joins neuroscientist Ned Sahin, Empowered Brain Institute CEO Rafiq Abdus-Sabur, computer scientist Karthik Dinakar, and disability advocate Finn Gardiner to explore what it means to be non-neurotypical, barriers to inclusion, and how creators can make their work more accessible.

Rafiq Abdus-Sabur is president and CEO of The Empowered Brain Institute, a nonprofit disability advocacy and support organization for individuals with autism and their families. Rafiq is a board member for Brain Power LLC and founder of the education technology firm, Edgewise Education.

Finn Gardiner is a disability advocate and policy analyst specializing in intersectional disability justice and accessible technology. He is a research assistant at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University where his work focuses on public policies for autistic individuals.

Karthik Dinakar is a computer scientist and the founder of C3PO, or the Cambridge Computational Clinical Psychology Org, a group of interdisciplinary researchers focused on bringing together machine learning, causal inference and clinical psychology.

Moderator: Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at MIT, co-director of the Media Lab’s Advancing Wellbeing Initiative, and faculty chair of MIT’s MindHandHeart Initiative. She co-founded the technology companies Empatica, Inc., which creates wearable sensors and analytics to improve health, and Affectiva, Inc., which delivers technology to help measure and communicate emotion.

This event is sponsored by The MindHandHeart Innovation Fund and Radius at MIT. All Communications Forum events are free and open to the general public.

MIT Communications Forum

Designing for a Neurodiverse World

From the earliest days of networked computing, music fans were there, shaping the technologies and cultures that emerged online. By the time musicians and industry figures realized they could use the internet to reach audiences directly, those audiences had already established their presences and social norms online, putting them in unprecedented positions of power. Even widely-hailed innovators like David Bowie, Prince, and Trent Reznor were late to the game. This talk traces the intertwined histories of music fandom and online culture, unpacking the fundamental disruption and its broader implications for interacting with audiences.

Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Research Affiliate in CMS/W at MIT. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Illinois in 1994 and joined Microsoft in 2012 after 18 years as a Communication professor. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity Press), now in its second edition, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage Press), and co-editor of Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (Sage Press) with Annette Markham. Her bookPlaying to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection will be published in July by NYU Press.  More information, most of her articles, and some of her talks are available at nancybaym.com.

Music Fandom and the Shaping of Online Culture

When everyday citizens interact about politics today, they often do so (1) anonymously and (2) in digital space, which results in a kind of aggressive chaos. But what happens when people identify themselves to one another in place-based communities as they do, for example, when writing letters to the editor of their local newspaper? How does that change public discussion?

This talk by Roderick Hart operationalizes the concept of “civic hope” and reports the results of a long-term study of 10,000 letters to the editor written between 1948 and the present in twelve small American cities. Hart’s argument is that the vitality of a democracy lies not in its strengths but in its weaknesses and in the willingness of its people to address those weaknesses without surcease. If democracies were not shot-through with unstable premises and unsteady compacts, its citizens would remain quiet, removed from one another. Disagreements – endless, raucous disagreements – draw them in, or at least enough of them to sustain civic hope.

Roderick Hart is the Allan Shivers Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and the founding director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life. He is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why. He is also the author of DICTION 7.0, a computer program designed to analyze language patterns. Dr. Hart has been inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas and has also been designated Professor of the Year for the State of Texas from the Carnegie/C.A.S.E. Foundation.

The Language of Civic Life: Past to Present

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 program of targeted killing are implicated in perpetuating the very architectures of enmity that they take as their necessitating conditions. Taking any apparatus for the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force as problematic, this talk joins a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, infrastructures and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. Lucy Suchman’s concern is with the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of (in)security, their deadly and injurious effects, and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations. She closes with some thoughts on how we might interrupt the workings of these apparatuses, in the service of wider movements for social justice.

Lucy Suchman is a Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom.

Lucy Suchman: "Artificial Intelligence and Modern Warfare"

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.

Justin Reich, "Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education"

Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics (1993) and Reinventing Comics (2001) graced us with an excellent talk about his latest book, Making Comics, as a part of his Making Comics Fifty States tour, which he is also blogging.

Scott McCloud, "Making Comics"

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 conferences across Canada and the United States provided many venues to share their work. In this presentation, Patricia Saulis will feature clips of the Elders speaking and provide some perspective on how their work could be brought forward in discussions of Environmental Justice and Media.


About Patricia Saulis

Patricia Saulis is Executive Director of the Maliseet Nation Conservation Council and a member of the Maliseet tribe of Indigenous people, whose lands lie along the Saint John River watershed on both sides of the US and Canadian border in Northeast Maine and Southern New Brunswick. Ms. Saulis is an experienced tribal policy administrator, environmentalist, and educational planner, and has a very extensive background working in tribal organizations on matters of social well-being, education and environmental sustainability.

In the midst of a highly fluid environment of changing political, economic, partnership, and financial circumstances, Ms. Saulis keeps the mission of restoring Wolastoq/St John Watershed in accordance with Maliseet rights and cultural stewardship squarely in her sights.

Ms. Saulis also has an impressive background in public health issues and policy surrounding First Nations communities throughout Canada. These experiences cover the breadth of important and current issues that impact Indigenous communities and represent her strong background and commitment in ensuring the betterment of not just her own Indigenous community but those of the entirety of North America.

Transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-patricia-saulis-two-eyed-seeing

Patricia Saulis, “Two-Eyed Seeing in Environmental Justice and Media”

Denis Dyack is the founder and president of Silicon Knights. In this capacity, he oversees the creation and development of games, and continues to further the growth of the company. Dyack is a noted authority on interactive software development and offers valuable insight into the process of designing next-generation games that appeal to the masses. Under Dyack’s direction, Silicon Knights has evolved into one of the top independent interactive software developers in the world. Dyack (B. Phed, H. B.Sc, M. Sc.) founded Silicon Knights in 1992 after publishing Cyber Empires in 1991. Since that time, Silicon Knights has moved from creating PC games to premiere AAA console titles, such as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the original PlayStation. Working with Nintendo as a second party, Silicon Knights created the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness. Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create another critically acclaimed game, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Dyack and his team are currently working with Microsoft on the Too Human trilogy for the Xbox 360, and developing an exciting new game for Sega of America.

A Talk with Denis Dyack

The eminent MIT professor, author most recently of Alone, Together, discusses her darkening view of our digitizing world, her sense of the culture of MIT and its students, and her own career with Communications Forum Director David Thorburn, a longtime colleague.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

Co-sponsor: Technology and Culture Forum at MIT

A Conversation with Sherry Turkle

Digital technologies have exponentially expanded the power of government and corporations to keep tabs on citizens. But citizens in turn are exploiting new technologies to expose the activities of governments, companies and even each other. How does the persistence and ubiquity of surveillance in our digitizing world affect what it means to be a citizen? Does our emerging condition of constant surveillance encourage individuals to curtail how they speak and act — or to offer more information? In what ways are new forms of citizen surveillance and public witness instruments of democracy and transparency? In what ways are they tools of distortion and propaganda for ideologues or special interests? Our panel of three distinguished scholars will engage these and related questions on evolving notions of citizenship in the digital age.

Panelists include Sandra Braman, a professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power from The MIT Press; Susan Landau, a visiting professor at Harvard University and author of Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, also published by The MIT Press; and Marcos Novak, professor and artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Surveillance and Citizenship

Everything we learn, know and understand is physical — a matter of brain circuitry. This basic fact has deep implications for how politics is understood, how campaigns are framed, why conservatives and progressives talk past each other, and why progressives have more problems framing messages than conservatives do — and what they can do about it.

George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard (1965-69) and the University of Michigan (1969-1972).

He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966.

Read more at georgelakoff.com.

George Lakoff, "The Brain's Politics: How Campaigns Are Framed and Why"

The first event in the Ancient and Medieval Studies Seminar Series and co-sponsored by Literature, HTC, and the SHASS Dean’s Office.

Writing, in relation to such affiliated topics as literacy, linguistics, cognition, and media studies, has a central place across and beyond the humanistic disciplines. It is time, in turn, for historians of medieval art to take a broader view of paleography, rather than view it primarily as a means of dating or localizing monuments, or, at the most literal level, deciphering illustrated texts or epigraphic inscriptions.

Within the realm of visual imagery, the written word can rise to a form of representation in its own right, prior to and independent of the complex phenomena generally considered under the rubric of “text and image” — a generalization as true of modern art as it is of the Middle Ages. In contrast to modernity, however, through much of the Middle Ages, as in Antiquity, the primary status of the spoken word and oral delivery ensured that writing, no less than picturing, was subject to suspicion.

Professor Hamburger’s presentation will survey some, if hardly all, of the many aspects of medieval script as a pictorial form, using examples ranging from Late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages and beyond.

Jeffrey Hamburger’s teaching and research focus on the art of the High and later Middle Ages. Among his areas of special interest are medieval manuscript illumination, text-image issues, the history of attitudes towards imagery and visual experience, and German vernacular religious writing of the Middle Ages, especially in the context of mysticism. Much of his scholarship has focused on the art of female monasticism. His current research includes a project that seeks to integrate digital technology into the study and presentation of liturgical manuscripts, a study of narrative imagery in late medieval German prayer books and a major international exhibition on German manuscript illumination in the age of Gutenberg.

Professor Hamburger’s books include The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West and The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany.

Hamburger holds both his B.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. He previously held teaching positions at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. He has been a guest professor in Zurich, Paris, Oxford and Fribourg, Switzerland.

Jeffrey Hamburger, "Script as Image"

Linda Gregerson discusses her new book of poems, The Selvage, and her calling as a poet and professor of Renaissance literature in conversation with Forum Director David Thorburn and members of the audience.

A 2007 National Book Award finalist and a recent Guggenheim Fellow, Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature. She is the author of four books of poetry and two books of criticism. Gregerson’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Among her honors and awards are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Kingsley Tufts Award, four Pushcart Prizes, grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Humanities Center.

Linda Gregerson, "Why I Write Poems"

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.

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

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