MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

What separates a good teacher from a great one? How are digital technologies challenging traditional teaching methods? And are there distinctions between top-notch science instructors and their counterparts in humanities or social science? Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, Weisskopf Professor of Physics Alan Guth and MIT biology professor Hazel Sive–all honored teachers–will explore these issues with Literature professor and Communications Forum director emeritus David Thorburn. David Thorburn is an MIT Literature professor, director emeritus of the Communications Forum, and a past winner of MIT’s MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching. Robert Pinsky is a three-term US Poet Laureate. He is a recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. Alan Guth is MIT’s Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, pioneer of the inflationary model of the universe and recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching. Hazel Sive is a biology professor at MIT, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.

Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to see its traces, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities. Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice.

Economic literacy has long been touted as a potential solution to national economic crisis and individual financial precarity. But what does it mean to be economically literate? In a field full of contestation, how do some perspectives get disqualified or excluded, and others held up as facts? Between 1976 and 1978, the nonprofit, quasi-governmental public service advertising organization The Advertising Council saturated the American media environment with messages about American citizens’ responsibility to become economically knowledgeable, and distributed over ten million copies of a glossy brochure designed to teach citizens the least they needed to know about the American economic system. Activist groups criticized the Ad Council campaign as propagandistic–but when these groups responded with their own information campaigns, they found themselves excluded from access to public funds and airwaves. Where was the line between objective information and propaganda? Who had the power to decide? How has this dynamic changed over time, as new media technologies have emerged and neoliberal policies and philosophies have moved from the margins to the center of American political culture? In this talk, Jack calls attention to corporate managers and executives as consequential social and ontological actors with distinctive vernacular theories of media and politics. Caroline Jack is an Exchange Scholar in CMS/W and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her article “Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series” was recently published in Enterprise and Society.

Traditional media outlets have been facing budget cuts and layoffs for years, with specialized reporters often among the first to go. And yet last year, Boston Globe Media Partners made a significant investment in launching STAT, a new publication that focuses on health, medicine and scientific discovery. STAT's leadership and reporting team will discuss the publication’s progress and how the field of science journalism is changing. Speakers Rick Berke is the executive editor of STAT and former executive editor of POLITICO. Berke joined The New York Times in 1986 and served as a political correspondent and senior editor for nearly three decades. Carl Zimmer is a national correspondent for STAT and hosts the site's “Science Happens" video series. Zimmer also writes the "Matter" column at The New York Times and has written 12 books including Soul Made Flesh, which was named as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Rebecca Robbins is a reporter for STAT covering money in life sciences. Moderator: Seth Mnookin, associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

Beginning in the late 1990s, the technology and even mainstream press opined extensively on the coming death of television. A decade later—and a time that found television still very much alive—that theme evolved to instead pronounce the coming death of cable. Rather than demise, the emergence of broadband-distributed television has both reinvented the medium and revealed how extensively our expectations and understandings of television are based not on the medium of television but on logics developed for its broadcast distribution. Amanda D. Lotz’s talk presents key arguments of her current book project, Being Wired: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All with a focus on what transpired when the long anticipated face off between “new media” and television finally took place in 2010. Lotz is professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan where she studies contemporary media industries, television, and gender and media. She is the author of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York University Press, 2007; Rev. 2nd ed. 2014), Cable Guys: Television and American Masculinities in the 21st Century(2014), and Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era (University of Illinois Press, 2006), and editor of Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era (Routledge, 2009). She is co-author, with Timothy Havens, of Understanding Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2011; 2nd ed. 2016) and, with Jonathan Gray, of Television Studies (Polity, 2011).Her current work examines how cable changed television and became the dominant supplier of internet access in the early twenty-first century.

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 and the art collection Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture (both with Damian Duffy). Jennings is also the co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem, MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco, and the AstroBlackness colloquium in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Jennings’ current comics projects include the Hiphop adventure comic Kid Code: Channel Zero, the supernatural crime noir story Blue Hand Mojo, and the upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred.

Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, 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, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit. The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), a linear documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem (currently in production), and a community-sourced, web-based documentary and oral history project, “The Lost Histories Project” (in development). Bald’s talk and demo presented a new iteration of the online project and newly edited material from the documentary.

"Each spring, the CMS side of CMSW catapults ten more master’s program graduates into the world. And each fall, we invite a bunch back to talk with prospectives. Of the five grads we feature in this podcast, four stayed close. In fact two helped start research groups in our department. And another two skipped to other parts of campus. One joined a Ph.D. program a few buildings down, and another kicked off the Media Lab’s new digital currency initiative. Margaret Weigel, '02 and one of our earliest graduates, works in digital education. 2007’s Dan Roy, the only panelist you didn’t hear, develops games for learning. Ilya Vedrashko, ‘06, works in data-driven consumer research. Erik Stayton, 2015, is a Ph.D. candidate in MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society. And Chelsea Barabas, also 2015, is the newly minted advisor to the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative."

On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, we hosted five alums of our master's degree program in Comparative Media Studies. They discussed their lives from MIT to their careers today. Here's who we featured: Margaret Weigel, ’02, who works in digital education: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3427777 Dan Roy, ’07, widely known for his games for learning projects: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=2512953 Ilya Vedrashko, ’06, who does big data-driven consumer research: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3838774 Erik Stayton, ’15, now a Ph.D. student at MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society: http://web.mit.edu/hasts/graduate/stayton.html Chelsea Barabas, ’15, the newly minted advisor to the Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=75805502

Our information sessions bring prospective master's students to campus to meet our faculty and students, who discuss the program, its research, what it's like to apply, and the experience of studying at MIT for two years. The 2015 infosession was led by graduate program director Prof. Heather Hendershot and program administrator Shannon Larkin, and it featured research group directors like Ethan Zuckerman of the Center for Civic Media and Sarah Wolozin of the Open Documentary Lab; several current graduate students; and questions from attendees on-campus and online. If there was anything we didn't cover, don't hesitate to contact us at cmsw@mit.edu!