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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Creators, Classrooms, and Cell: Designing For The Benefits and Limitations of Learning in Immersive Virtual Reality
Grounding VR within the greater context of technology-mediated learning by examining its affordances, relevant educational frameworks, and cognitive limitations through the academic lenses of pedagogy, cognitive science, and educational psychology.
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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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Wrestling With Systemic Edges: Designing For Long-Term Social Change
How the lack of nuance in data representation and media practices of the American educational system impedes the design of effective educational interventions for low-income Black youth.
