Theses
The full complement of CMS graduate student theses — on television, games, activism, education, and more.
Theses are also available at DSpace (both CMS and Science Writing), MIT’s own repository for its community’s academic publications.
-
Playing It By Ear: Improvised Music Livestreaming During COVID-19
How communities built around improvised music — which themselves are often supported by improvisatory DIY event organizing practices — adapted from in-person livestreamed events.
-
Sex, Power, and Technology: A Relational Engineering Ethos As Feminist Utopia
Relational engineering to develop technology that stands in contrast to dominant notions in US tech culture that prioritize profit, scale, productivity, and solutionism.
-
The Network and the Classroom: A History of Hypermedia Learning Environments
Examining the history of hypermedia knowledge organization tools by looking at both successful and failed experiments in bringing them into classrooms, one can more deeply understand the conceptual origins of the recent generation of networked knowledge tools and how to avoid challenges that have plagued them in the past.
-
Hillbilly Talkback: Co-Creation and Counter-Narrative in Appalachia
“I explore some of the most common image types used to represent Appalachia in popular media and assess the potential of co-creative documentary practices to create representations which challenge these harmful images.”
-
Virtual Worldmaking: A Phantasmal Media Approach To VRChat
How the systemic proliferation of the “anime girl” avatar in the social VR platform VRChat reflects gendered biopolitics of power and control
-
Cashing in On Student Data: Standardized Testing and Predatory College Marketing in The United States
While the public has become aware of issues surrounding data collection, distribution, and analysis in online spaces, this discourse has not fully extended into education.
-
Disputing Facts, Disputing The Economy: Media Controversies at The Decline of The Peruvian Miracle
The concept of sociotechnical nonfictions highlights the role that expertise and media assemblages played in the (re)production of facts.
-
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.
-
Plague On The Prairie: The Fight To Save Black-Footed Ferrets From The West’s Most Insidious Disease
When a single remaining population of black-footed ferrets was discovered in Meeteetse, Wyoming in 1981, scientists had one last chance to save North America’s only native ferret from extinction.
-
Aliens Inferred
How scientists are searching for alien life — and the limitations and ambiguity in data interpretation.
-
Health Equity Rituals: A Case for the Ritual View of Communication in an Era of Precision Medicine
A combination of theory, applied media practices, educational field work, and design to highlight the opportunities that a ritual view of communication presents to advance health equity.
-
Fursonas: Furries, Community, and Identity Online
Furry queers fandom through several interrelated processes: severing fandom from textual objects; developing queer sex publics; paving new pathways to queer becoming; and displacing online identity through stylized, affective modes of embodiment.
-
Where the Desert Ghost Roams
As it becomes harder for the Sonoran pronghorn to escape increasingly inescapable human activity, it also becomes harder for the recovery team to ensure the Sonoran pronghorn survives.
-
Unraveling The High Heel
Looking at the effects of high heel use on the body, the history of the high heel and discussing the reasons why countless women have endured a shoe that is by design uncomfortable.
-
Data Visualizations for Perspective Shifts and Communal Cohesion
Data visualizations that convey emotions, embodiment, and arise from a participatory design process grounded in design justice and data feminist principles, can inspire the collective discussions and perspective shifts required for communal cohesion.
