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.
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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.
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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.
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Aliens Inferred
How scientists are searching for alien life — and the limitations and ambiguity in data interpretation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Subverting the Algorithm: Examining Anti-Algorithmic Tactics on Social Media
An investigation of anti-algorithmic tactics through two case studies of social media users responding to algorithmic content moderation and content curation
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Last Night a DJ Queered My Life: Disrupting the Mythologies of a Popular Media Practice
This project examines queer and feminist DJ practice through ethnographic research with women and nonbinary DJs of color.
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Roguelife: Digital Death in Videogames and Its Design Consequences
A multifaceted theoretical framework to inform my investigation of the roguelike genre and its atypical model of death.
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Operational Atmosphere: Mediating Policing in the ‘Fight Against Crime’ and ‘Rural Terrorism’ in Chile
This thesis delves into a critical study of the contemporary anatomy of power, in which mediation processes are becoming central to policing practices, with a focus on two contexts: the fight against crime in urban areas, and the battle against “rural violence” or “terrorism” in the Mapuche indigenous territories in the south of Chile.
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Mass Appeal: Saving The World’s Bananas From A Devastating Fungus
While a global effort is underway to replace or modify the Cavendish banana, there is no clear solution yet.
