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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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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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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Scaling up behavioral science interventions in online education
“Adequately supporting diverse students will require more than a light-touch intervention.”
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Student poems during COVID-19: “Pandemic Spring”
“It turns out that stress, uncertainty, fear, confinement, isolation and discomfort still, after centuries of human suffering, lead writers to write.”
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AI-Generated Literature and the Vectorized Word
This thesis focuses on contemporary AI-generated literature that has been traditionally published in the form of a printed book.
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Media Cartographies of Broadband Access in Brazil: The Case of the Geostationary Defense and Strategic Communications Satellite (SGDC-1) and Rural Schools
“Through a critical media studies approach, I describe how the satellite’s sociotechnical relations reveal what remains largely obscure to Brazilian publics.”
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Theory and Practice Towards a Decentralized Internet
This thesis scrutinizes the evolution of Internet technologies, the changing paradigms of netizens’ online interactions, and the socioeconomic structures of Internet platforms in the larger context of the proposed shift from a centralized web to a decentralized one.
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Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR
Examining how VR directs emotional identification not toward the subjects of particular VR titles, but toward VR developers themselves.
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Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (2020)
Associate Professor Sasha Costanza-Chock’s new book is “an exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.”
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The Other Digital China (2019)
Professor Jing Wang tells the story of change makers operating within the Chinese Communist system, whose ideas of social action necessarily differ from those dominant in Western, liberal societies.
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In Medias Res 2019
“Recent months have been filled with wonderful moments as we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Comparative Media Studies program.”
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Three Flames: A Novel (2019)
Three Flames portrays the struggles of a Cambodian farming family against the extreme patriarchal attitudes of their society and a cruel and dictatorial father, set in a rural community that is slowly being exposed to the modern world and its values.
