MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies
Studying Media and Making Media
Is the de facto segregation that exists in many Northern cities a result of the lack of forced integration of the type that took place in the South?
Vivek Bald discusses his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit.
John Jennings is an Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo-State University of New York. He is the co-author of the graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture, Vol. 1.
How are “tweens” represented in popular culture, including music, television, and YA literature? And how does this relatively new age category intersect with--or elide--issues pertaining to race, class, and gender identity?
André Brock, scholar of Black cyberculture, offers that Twitter's feature set and ubiquity map closely onto Black discursive identity.
Operating under the oppressive structures of masculinity, heterosexuality, and Whiteness that are sustained in digital spaces, marginalized women persevere and resist such hegemonic realities.
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.
Yasmin Kafai and Gabriela Richard expand the discussions on gender, race, and sexuality in gaming.
andré carrington's research on the cultural politics of race in science fiction radio drama aims to expand the repertoire of literary adaptation studies by reintegrating critical perspectives from marginal and popular sectors of the media landscape into the advancing agendas of Afrofuturism and decolonization.
Jenny Korn uses critical race theories and intersectional feminist theories to analyze the visual and textual content of the blog #IfTheyGunnedMeDown to reveal constructions of social justice, respectability politics, media biases, racial stereotypes, viral popularity, and hashtag activism on Tumblr.
A discussion of Black Panther at the MIT Black Students' Union Lounge, co-organized by Annis Rachel Sands (CMS master's student) and Ángel R. Rodríguez (Harvard University Ph.D. candidate).
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.
Kimberly Juanita Brown will focus on US news media coverage of apartheid in the last year of its existence, and the images that anchored viewers' interpretation of the event.
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.
Looking at processes behind media-making and information sharing, this talk by Rachel Kuo demonstrates ways that racial justice movements create and sustain connections across incommensurable and uneven racial differences.
