MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

How has mobile media changed the ways that nomadic communities receive and send information, engage state actors, and participate in international deliberations? Allison Hahn examines the ways that two pastoral-nomadic communities, Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania and Mongolians of Mongolia and China, are utilizing new media and social media platforms to challenge power hierarchies and deliberative norms. Many governmental policy makers presume that this technological adaptation indicates a determination amongst nomadic communities to integrate and settle. This presentation asks if nomadic communities might instead be incorporating new media technologies as a method to preserve their traditional lifestyles while engaging in national and international deliberations about land policy. Hahn draws from evidence of this engagement found in Maasai and Mongolian use of YouTube, RenRen, Twitter and Facebook as well as in-person protests and her decade of fieldwork amongst pastoral-nomadic communities. In this talk, Hahn focuses on specific examples from Maasai and Mongolian communities, as well as addresses the broader questions of how academics might engage once-distant communities and better understand the complexity of mobile media and nomadic deliberation.

Allison Hahn (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York – Baruch College. Her current book project, Nomads, New Media, and the State (in progress) explores the ways pastoral-nomadic communities in Central Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East are utilizing new and mobile technologies to participate in conservation policy and negotiate land rights.

As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at MIT, Douglas O’Reagan will study how the digital humanities can best aid the specific strengths, mission, and broader community around MIT. In this talk, O’Reagan updates the audience on his efforts and invite suggestions and ideas concerning the future of digital humanities at MIT.

O’Reagan completed his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2014. His dissertation was a comparative history of the Allied powers’ attempts to study and copy German science and technology during and after the Second World War. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership in UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering from 2014-2015, where he worked with an interdisciplinary team on applying data science, econometric analysis, and historical research in studying the origins and impacts of specific breakthrough technologies. In 2015 he became a visiting assistant professor at Washington State University’s Tri-Cities campus, where he taught history and served as Lead Archivist and Director of the Oral History Program for the Hanford History Project, which manages the US Department of Energy’s collections related to the Hanford site of the Manhattan Project.

The Exit Zero Project (www.exitzeroproject.org) is a transmedia exploration of the traumatic effects of the loss of the steel industry in Southeast Chicago, the impact that deindustrialization has had on expanding class inequalities in the United States more broadly, and how Americans talk – and fail to talk – about social class. The project includes an award-winning book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013) authored by Christine Walley, as well as a documentary film, entitled Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2016) made in conjunction with director and filmmaker Chris Boebel. The book and film use first person narration to trace the stories of multiple generations of writer/producer Walley’s family in this once-thriving steel mill community. From the turn-of-the-century experience of immigrants who worked in Chicago’s mammoth industries to the labor struggles of the 1930s to the seemingly unfathomable closure of the steel mills in the 1980s and 90s, these family stories convey a history that serves as a microcosm of the broader national experience of deindustrialization and its economic and environmental aftermath. The project also includes an interactive documentary website with both a storytelling and archival component that is being made in collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. In this talk, Professor Walley will talk about her research into this topic and how it found expression in a book, website, and documentary film.

Walley received a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her first book, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton University Press, 2004), was based on field research exploring environmental conflict in rural Tanzania. Chris Walley and Chris Boebel are also the co-creators and co-instructors of the documentary film production and theory class DV Lab: Documenting Science Through Video and New Media.

The present age is one of growing faith in machinic knowledge. From state surveillance to self-tracking technologies, we find lofty promises about the power of “raw” data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making. But new claims to knowledge invariably entail a redistribution of uncertainty, of those in the know and those left ignorant, of proofs “good enough” and “negligible” risks. Today, the U.S. government struggles to “prove” the efficacy of its own surveillance programs. The calculability of terrorist threat becomes profoundly indeterminable, exemplified by the figure of the “lone wolf”. Meanwhile, the self-tracking industry promises unerringly objective self-knowledge through machines that know you better than you know yourself. The present struggles with “big” data and surveillance are not just a question of privacy and security, but how promises of knowledge and its bounty enact a redistribution of authority, credibility and responsibility. In short, it is a question of how human individuals become the ingredient for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves.

Sun-ha Hong is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at CMS/W @ MIT, and has a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His writing examines the collective fantasies invested in technology, media and communication.

CMS/W alum Sam Ford (S.M., CMS, ’07) has spent most of the last decade exploring points of connection and contention between the media and marketing industries and media studies. Starting last year, that work has taken him to Univision’s Fusion Media Group (a portfolio of media companies which includes Fusion, Univision Digital, Univision Music, The Root, Flama, The Onion, A.V. Club, Clickhole, Starwipe, and El Rey), leading a team that has been building the conglomerate’s approach to experimentation outside of the company’s core day-to-day operations.

In this colloquium, Sam is joined by his colleague Federico Rodriguez Tarditi to discuss what they have learned thus far from Fusion Media Group’s experiments with exploring new ways of telling stories, new approaches to building relationships with key publics important to our portfolio, new ways of working internally, and new types of roles/positions in the company. They also talk about what they have learned while working with internal teams, academic groups, non-profits, other companies, startups, foundations, and other groups and the challenges of measuring success for experimentation that often exist outside day-to-day media company operations…and some of which may speak more to the company’s larger mission than direct paths to profitability.

Sam Ford is a Vice President at Fusion and Head of Fusion Media Group’s Center for Innovation and Engagement. Federico Rodriguez Tarditi serves as Project Manager for the Center for Innovation and Engagement.

(This is obviously better enjoyed as a video! Watch this talk and the accompanying visuals at http://cmsw.mit.edu/video-virtual-reality-meets-documentary)

+++++++++++

The goal of this panel is to talk with some of the leading creators in the VR space and better understand VR’s potentials and implications for documentary and journalism. This will help us to disambiguate some of the major strands of VR and in so doing consider the inherent tensions in VR between documentation and simulation, the challenges of spatial storytelling and new narrative structures, the ethics and cognitive neuroscience of immersion, interaction, and affect; and VR’s past and future.

Speakers:

Raney Aronson-Rath, FRONTLINE

Katy Morrison, Virtual Reality studio VRTOV

Nonny de la Peña, "The Godmother of Virtual Reality”

Caspar Sonnen, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

Nearly everyone these days imaginatively uses virtual identities such as social media profiles, e-commerce accounts, and/or videogame characters. Yet, virtual identities can reproduce discrimination and stereotypes with devastating impacts on users ranging from worse performance and engagement for students to bullying and threats of violence. If such forms of oppression persist, e.g., female virtual identity users being threatened online, surely we must go advance our understanding of the roles these technologies play in society and how to design them to better suit diverse social needs. In this talk, Harrell presents some of the outcomes from his 5-year National Science Foundation-supported research initiative called the Advanced Identity Representation project. Namely, applying approaches from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and sociology to technologies such as videogames and social media, his research both reveals social biases in existing systems and implements systems to respond to those biases with greater nuance and expressive power.

D. Fox Harrell is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab). He was a 2014-15 recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication and fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

The algorithmic infrastructures of the internet are made by a weird cast of characters: rock stars, gurus, ninjas, wizards, alchemists, park rangers, gardeners, plumbers, and janitors can all be found sitting at computers in otherwise unremarkable offices, typing. These job titles, sometimes official, sometimes informal, are a striking feature of internet industries. They mark jobs as novel or hip, contrasting starkly with the sedentary screenwork of programming. But is that all they do? In this talk, drawing on several years of fieldwork with the developers of algorithmic music recommenders, Seaver describes how these terms help people make sense of new kinds of jobs and their positions within new infrastructures. They draw analogies that fit into existing prestige hierarchies (rockstars and janitors) or relationships to craft and technique (gardeners and alchemists). They aspire to particular imaginations of mastery (gurus and ninjas). Critics of big data have drawn attention to the importance of metaphors in framing public and commercial understandings of data, its biases and origins. The metaphorical borrowings of role terms serve a similar function, highlighting some features at the expense of others and shaping emerging professions in their image. If we want to make sense of new algorithmic industries, we’ll need to understand how they make sense of themselves.

Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. His current research examines the cultural life of algorithms for understanding and recommending music. He received a masters from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program in 2010 for research on the history of the player piano.

“Mooning Texas” – an adventure story involving social energy + art + Emile Durkheim’s “take” on Mauss + Hubert’s “take” on mana + the creativity of gossip.

Michael Taussig, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, was dubbed by the New York Times as “Anthropology’s Alternative Radical.” Taussig has been doing fieldwork since 1969. He has written on the commercialization of peasant agriculture; slavery; hunger; the working of commodity fetishism; colonialism on “shamanism” and folk healing; the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual; the making, talking, and writing of terror; and mimesis. He has also written “a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia.”

Introduced by Prof. Ian Condry, Global Studies and Languages, MIT.

Presented by the Dissolve Inequality series and the Latin American Studies Forum of MIT Global Studies and Languages.

Last December, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. In March, he added that “I think Islam hates us.” MIT alumna and Wise Systems co-founder Layla Shaikley join engineering masters student Abubakar Abid to explore how this type of hateful, discriminatory rhetoric influences public opinion, discuss its impact on the daily lives of Muslim-Americans, and examine strategies for combating it.

Layle Shaikley is an MIT alum, co-founder of Wise Systems and co-founder of TEDxBaghdad. With her viral video sensation “Muslim Hipsters: #mipsterz,” she helped launch a national conversation about how Muslim women are represented.

Abubakar Abid is a engineering masters student at MIT and a member of the Muslim Student Association.

Hisham Bedri is an MIT graduate who studied new imaging technologies and their implications on privacy.

Moderator: Seth Mnookin, associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and director of the MIT Communications Forum.