Director, Comparative Media Studies, uricchio AT mit DOT edu
Associate Professor of Anthropology, E53-335U, 617-258-7908, cwalley AT mit DOT edu
Christine Walley is an associate professor in the Anthropology Department and also teaches classes in Women’s Studies and Comparative Media Studies. Her research and teaching interests include: the environment, development, gender, documentary/ethnographic film, and theories of globalization and capitalism. She received a B.A. in anthropology from Pomona College in 1987 and a Ph.D in sociocultural anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her book, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park ( Princeton University Press, 2004), is based on 19 months of fieldwork in East Africa. She has published on the controversial topic of female genital surgeries in Africa as well as the relationship between science and “indigenous knowledge.” She has also recently begun work on a new book about social class and identity in the United States and is co-directing and producing a documentary video, “Exit Zero,” that explores changing community life in a former Midwestern steeltown.
Former Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, running Interactive Cinema and Media Fabrics group; presently runs the Tidmarsh Farms project
Trained as a sculptor and documentary filmmaker, Ms. Davenport has achieved international recognition for her work in the digital media forms. Davenport’s research explores fundamental issues related to the collaborative co-construction of digital media experiences, where the task of narration is split among authors, consumers, and computer mediators. Davenport’s recent work focuses on the creation of customizable, personalizable storyteller systems which dynamically serve and adapt to a widely dispersed society of audience.
Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media, 14N-435, 617-452-5086, vbald AT mit DOT edu
Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem.