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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Critical Breaking
Utilizing critical and feminist science and technology studies methods, this thesis offers a new framework, called critical breaking, to allow for reflective and critical examination and analysis of instances of error, breakdown, and failure in digital systems.
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The Allure of Choice: Agency and Worldbuilding in Branching-Path Transmedia Universes
Agency is often taken as a given in branching-path stories because they, almost by definition, allow for enhanced user involvement. But this truism hasn’t changed as the structure of the worlds that these branching texts exist within have.
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From Trump Tower to the White House, in 140 Characters: The Hyper-Mediated Election of a Paranoid Populist President
Trump’s political communications reached a wider audience, on a sturdier basis, than earlier figures who had similarly adopted a “paranoid populist” philosophy.
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Technology Against Technocracy: Toward Design Strategies for Critical Community Technology
This thesis develops an intersectional, critical analysis of the field of practice known as Civic Tech and highlights other relevant community-organizing and activist practices that utilize technology as a central component.
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Everything is Awful: Snark as Ritualized Social Practice in Online Discourse
Snark can adopt a pro-social role in online environments whose architecture tends to reward vapid or deceptive content.
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Frontlines of Crisis, Forefront of Change: Climate Justice as an Intervention into (Neo)colonial Climate Action Narratives and Practices
Radical media strategies, on the streets and on the airwaves, are central to the articulation of climate justice and the contestation of hegemonic meanings of climate action that legitimise colonial violence.
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Narrative as an Aid for the Doctor-Patient Relationship in China
In China, when doctor-patient tension intensifies, some news media tend to blame the doctors, using misleading narratives to create sensationalism, thereby aggravating the antagonism between the society and medical professionals.
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Operational Images and the Interpretive Turn
Through the history of cartography, surveillance, and reconnaissance runs a long tale of instrumentalization, a history of calculable images primed for machine-readability.
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The Parataxonomist Revolution: How a Group of Rural Costa Ricans Discovered 10,000 New Species
Hiring local people, rather than students or academics, as permanent field researchers upset traditional research structures, but has paid off for science and for local communities.
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Senses Lost: The Impossible Dilemma of Usher Syndrome, and Its Possible Solutions
The story of two people with Usher Syndrome — an infant with MYO7A-associated Ushers who was genetically diagnosed in her first year of life, and a retired man who likely suffers from USH2A-associated Ushers, whose life experience exemplifies the condition, but whose specific genetic mutation has never been identified.
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Ghost Forests of the Mid-Atlantic: How Sea-level Rise Is Killing Our Coastlines
As sea-level rise and human development combine to narrow the range of coastal ecosystems, problems arise for local flora and fauna, natural nutrient cycles, and coastal communities.
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Media of Mass Destruction: How Fake News Is Killing Italy’s Olive Trees
Criminal charges against scientists and public resistance due to inaccurate information may fuel the spread of an olive plant disease to the rest of Italy and eventually to the entire Mediterranean basin, with catastrophic economic consequences.
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SuperAgers: Do Octogenarians with Exceptional Memory Hold the Key to Healthy Aging?
Will the craniums of successful “SuperAgers” give science some leverage in the battle against dementia, or even against aging itself?
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Melvin Calvin: Nobel-Winning Chemist and SETI Scientist Wannabe
Even though Melvin Calvin’s claim to fame was his work on photosynthesis, his longest-running passion project was investigating the origins of life in the universe.
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Trial and Error: Medical Marijuana, the Absence of Evidence, and the Allure of Anecdote
Patients, caregivers, scientists, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and dispensary growers alike are calling for changes to government policies that restrict research. It’s high time to separate politics from science.
