Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, activist, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Center for Civic Media, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio (codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s first book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement, was published by the MIT Press in 2014. They are a board member of Allied Media Projects (AMP); AMP convenes the annual Allied Media Conference and cultivates media strategies for a more just, creative and collaborative world (alliedmedia.org).
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Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
Associate Professor Sasha Costanza-Chock’s new book is “an exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.”
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Podcast: Sasha Costanza-Chock, “#MoreThanCode: Practitioner-led Research to Reimagine Technology for Social Justice”
Sasha Costanza-Chock explores key findings and recommendations from #MoreThanCode (morethancode.cc), a recently-released field scan based on more than 100 practitioner interviews.
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New report: “#MoreThanCode: Practitioners reimagine the landscape of technology for justice and equity”
Published by the Technology for Social Justice Project, including CMS/W co-authors Associate Professor Sasha Costanza-Chock and recent master’s student Maya Wagoner, S.M., ’17.
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Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination
Associate Professor Sasha Costanza-Chock: “What paths, then, might lead us out of the matrix of domination?”
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Media, Communication, and Intersectional Analysis: Ten Comments for the International Panel on Social Progress
“The ‘filter bubble’ critique ignores the importance of subaltern counterpublics, although state and corporate propaganda is indeed a real problem.”
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Toward Transformative Media Organizing: LGBTQ and Two-Spirit Media Work in the United States
We found that despite scarce resources, many LGBTQ and Two-Spirit organizations have an intersectional analysis of linked systems of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other axes of identity and structural inequality.
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Children’s Civic Engagement in the Scratch Online Community
“By supporting channels for dutiful citizenship by way of policy, design decisions, or changing governance models, designers can create channels that foster dutiful citizenship while connecting with youth interests.”
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New report: Transformative Media Organizing in LGBTQ/Two-Spirit Communities
Associate Prof. Sasha Costanza-Chock, Civic Media’s Rahul Bhargava, and recent CMS grads Heather Craig and Yu Wang help author this “Out for Change” report.
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Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!
Drawing on extensive interviews, workshops, and media organizing projects, Sasha Costanza-Chock presents case studies of transmedia organizing in the immigrant rights movement.
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Podcast: “Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement” – Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Latest Book Release
As part of his book launch, Sasha Costanza-Chock shares some of his prior experiences working as both an activist and a researcher of social movements.
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Podcast and liveblog: Mary Flanagan
When it comes to games, Mary Flanagan asks, “how do we move people to be an effective force for change, for their own welfare and the welfare of others?”
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Podcast and liveblog: Sonia Livingstone, “The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age”
LSE’s Sonia Livingstone on how powerful forces of social reproduction result in missed opportunities for many youth in the risk society.
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Liveblog of Hong Qu: “Keepr: Algorithm for Extracting Entities, Eyewitnesses and Amplifiers”
“The journalists actually needed sources: people on the scene who could provide real information, or experts who were local to the event. Source credibility is much more valuable in following a story than just discovering topics.”
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Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement
This article investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops the concept of social movement media cultures
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Podcast: Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Media Culture in the Occupy Movement: from the People’s Mic to GlobalRevolution.tv”
Sasha Costanza-Chock on the tools, skills, social practices, and norms movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate, and amplify their media.
