MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Studying Media and Making Media

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Podcast, Kimberly Juanita Brown: “Imperial Arrangements: South African Apartheid and the Force of Photography”

Kimberly Juanita Brown

This talk by Kimberly Juanita Brown considers the prominence of graphic photographic images during the decades of apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, she is interested in an archive of indifference that permeates the era and orchestrates the viewer’s relationship to black subjectivity. For the talk she focuses on US news media coverage of apartheid in the last year of its existence, and the images that anchored viewers’ interpretation of the event.

Kimberly Juanita Brown is Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Assistant Professor for 2017-2018, hosted by MIT Literature and MIT Women’s & Gender Studies. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College and author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.

About Rachel Thompson

Rachel Thompson earned her bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology and Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Her honors thesis explored literature’s evolving role in the digital age through an ethnographic study of an online literary magazine. She also co-founded and directed the Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Reform, a network of eight volunteer groups that tutor in prisons across Massachusetts and work on advocacy initiatives relating to mass incarceration and education.

Before joining CMS, Rachel worked in Boston-area art museums — the Harvard Art Museums and the Peabody Essex Museum — with a focus on developing teaching curriculum for makerspaces as well as integrated digital media experiences for visitors.

At MIT, she worked as a Research Assistant in the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab under the direction of Lisa Parks.

Thesis: Incomplete Sentences: Exploitation and Empowerment in American Incarceration Media