Publications
Books, articles, papers, theses, and other publications produced by the faculty, students, and staff of MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing.
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Authenticity, Interactivity, and Collaboration in Virtual Reality Games: Best Practices and Lessons Learned
“In this paper, we document and summarize the studies associated with our 4-year design project, Collaborative Learning Environments in Virtual Reality (CLEVR).”
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“A Cellular Symphony”: A featured piece from Angles 2021, the best of MIT’s introductory writing subjects
“I’m ready for the lyricism of the lab,” writes biological engineer major Laura Schmidt-Hong.
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Messy on the inside: internet memes as mapping tools of everyday life
The first systematic analysis of memes created by Palestinians in Israel. An analysis of 150 memes reveals how memes are used to reflect on and intervene in Palestinian youths’ navigation of life in mixed cities under prolonged war and colonialism.
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What is National Belonging in a Nation that Doesn’t Belong?
“They ‘bypassed the nation,’ as I had put it, and instead forged human connections that were on a local and transnational scale.”
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Healing, Community, and Humanity: How Students and Teachers Want to Reinvent Schools Post-COVID
“The students and educators in our study emphasized themes of healing, community, and humanity as key learnings from the pandemic year and essential values to rebuilding schools.”
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Triple play, OTT TV, and the Chinese logic of “select commercialization”
“The future of the Chinese online TV industry is increasingly organized as an ecosystem economy.”
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From Media Effects to the Empathy Machine: The Nature of the Audience and the Persistence of Wishful Thinking
The shifting and often contradictory claims made for the audience, particularly in light of the documentary project.
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Of Miracles and Multiverses
In The Atlantic, Alan Lightman writes that “surprisingly, some recent proposals in physics reveal that believers and nonbelievers may have more in common than they think.”
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Restoring the Fairness Doctrine can’t prevent another Rush Limbaugh
Professor Heather Hendershot writes that “Limbaugh once boasted he had single-handedly ‘brought AM radio back from the dead.’ It was simultaneously one of the most accurate and least offensive comments he ever made.”
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Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings (2021)
Alan Lightman’s meditative essays on “the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between.”
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Ludics—Play as Humanistic Inquiry
In the introduction to the edited volume Ludics, Visiting Professor Eric Gordon and Vassiliki Rapti write that “this book takes the bold position that play is an antidote to dark times. Rather than an escape hatch, it provides opportunity for discovery, connection, joy, care, and relational aesthetics—conditions that are central to worldliness, not extraneous to it.”
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Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (2020)
A leader in educational technology separates truth from hype, explaining what tech can—and can’t—do to transform our classrooms.
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Heather Hendershot in the Washington Post: The 2020 party conventions are actually what the parties have always dreamed of
“Being online will give parties more control of how television viewers experience their conventions.”
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Money for Nothing (2020)
Thomas Levenson looks at “The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich”.
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Sea of Change
The future of the gulf will depend not just on the trajectory of ocean warming, but on whether people can rethink the way we use the environment, and adapt to a changing world.
