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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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.
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The Conservation Sacrifice: How Far New Zealand Will Go To Save Its Birds
The difficult decisions being made in New Zealand right now reflect the challenges and conflicts that arise around the world when wildlife protection requires significant changes and sacrifices.
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Asbestos, USA: A Little Town Once Thrived As The Asbestos Capital of The World – Now It Grapples With The Waste That Was Left Behind
An examination of how the BoRit site was remediated, and whether or not the safety of the animals and the resident is still in any jeopardy from the asbestos that remains underground.
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Navigating the 21st Century Without Vision: How the iPhone Changed the Landscape for Assistive Technology and Fueled the Movement Fighting for Digital Accessibility
The iPhone blurred the line between assistive technology and mainstream technology. It raised the bar for digital accessibility, adding fuel to the fire of the blind community’s movement for inclusive design.
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The Living Library
An indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon is combating climate change, deforestation, and loss of traditional knowledge by preserving their plants in the wild.
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Plague of Absence: Insect Declines and The Fate of Ecosystems
A research team in Costa Rica are using caterpillar-parasitoid interactions to make estimates about insect population health, and this thesis explore the reasons for and extent of insect declines and their consequences for humans.
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Manufacturing Dissent: Assessing the Methods and Impact of RT (Russia Today)
This thesis seeks to unravel and assess RT’s historical roots, its creation and evolution, its methods, and ultimately its impact on American politics and society.
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Future Tal: The Race To Build A Bot That Gabs Like A Human
As chatbots like Gunrock become more prevalent, their designers must make important decision to determine what chatbots say, which in turn has influence on the user.
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Minding the Empathy Gap: How Insights into Brains and Behaviors are Placating Polarization
Touching on neuroscience and social psychology, this thesis addresses how we come to define empathy, why and when we fail to express it, and how we can hope to recoup it.
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Play for Change: Educational Game Design for Grassroots Organizing
We need some of those interventions to come in the form of games, not necessarily because they are fun but because they contain crucial elements that are missing from the civic technologies that support engagement today.
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Incomplete Sentences: Exploitation and Empowerment in American Incarceration Media
In order to interrogate the ways in which such popular media can lift up or drown out the voices of those who are incarcerated, I critically analyze three case studies: a popular television show, an acclaimed podcast, and a recently released feature film with an accompanying documentary.
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Fission and Fury in Perry Ohio: One Town’s Fight to Save Their Nuclear Power Plant
Residents and town officials in Perry are not going quietly into the retrenchment of America’s nuclear energy industry.
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From the Sea to the Stars: The Forgotten Journeys of the Philippines’ Ancient Explorers
Modern Filipinos — who are even now making their first tentative steps into space — are heirs to a rich heritage of exploration, the story of which has yet to be fully told.
