MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies
Studying Media and Making Media
By examining perspectives we are exposed to and insulated from, we may be able to design tools and approaches that help readers increase their cognitive diversity and prepare themselves to tackle transnational challenges.
Instead of a narrow emphasis on political effects, Aswin Punathambekar draws on a range of cases across India, China, and the Middle East to ask: what happens when such phases of participation fade away?
Thomas DeFranz "wonders at the intertwining of African American social dances and political leadership, conceived as the bodies of elected officials."
Featuring social scientists, media theorists, writers, artists, activists, this unconference asks: "How can we dissolve the structures of power that produce today’s inequalities?"
How did political TV and radio move from honest intellectual combat to become a vast echo chamber? Heather Hendershot will answer this difficult question.
Women are chronically underrepresented in U.S. politics. Yet TV shows, fictions, and films have leapt ahead of the electoral curve. Political consultant Mary Anne Marsh and children/teens book author Ellen Emerson White look at the connections (if any) we can draw between representation and reality.
Cambridge City Councilman Nadeem Mazen and Wise Systems co-founder Layla Shaikley--both MIT alumni--join engineering student Abubakar Abid to explore how hateful, discriminatory rhetoric influences public opinion, discuss its impact on the lives of Muslim-Americans, and examine strategies to combat it.
Jennifer Stromer-Galley describes the large-scale collection and machine learning techniques used to study how presidential candidates use social media.
Slate's Jamelle Bouie on how race and ethnicity framed the election and how journalists and content creators can improve coverage of these issues moving forward.
Charles Musser: "19th century media forms set in motion not only a new way of imagining how to market national campaigns and candidates; they also helped to usher in novel forms of mass spectatorship."
Michael J. Lee charts the vital role of canonical post–World War II (1945–1964) books in generating, guiding, and sustaining conservatism as a political force in the United States.
University of North Carolina's Deen Freelon will explain how he and his collaborators are addressing challenges to analyzing Russian political influence operations and present key preliminary findings from their ongoing project focused on this campaign.
Stuart Stevens believes Republicans are in a “GOP apocalypse,” and he’s mobilizing conservatives to stop it.
Scott C. Richmond argues that what is at stake in #blacklivesmatter is a Black political form that is also an emphatically network form, operating below, beyond, and to the side of what can be practiced, grasped at the level of the individual, of intention, and of representation.
Sohail Daulatzai on The Battle of Algiers' "competing narratives, a battleground over the meaning and memory of decolonization and Western power, and a site for challenging the current imperial consensus."
