Team

CDI is a newly formed initiative at MIT Dept of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
We will be recruiting additional team members / researchers soon. Please contact mitcdi@mit.edu for more information.

Faculty Director

James Paradis

Robert M. Metcalfe Professor, MIT Comparative Media Studies | Writing

James Paradis is the Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing and Comparative Media Studies. He works on problems of the mutually-influential rise of professionalism and vernacular culture, the public reception of science, and the way in which fields of expertise are represented in popular media. His methods are comparative, and draw on cultural studies, biographical approaches, intellectual history, and the history of rhetoric to study science popularization, science fiction, science education, two-cultures controversies, science as entertainment, and vernacular science. These interests are highlighted in his various books, articles, and edited collections, including T. H. Huxley: Man's Place in Nature (Nebraska 1978); Victorian Science and Victorian Values (with T. Postlewait, Rutgers 1984); Evolution and Ethics (with G. Williams, Princeton 1989); Textual Dynamics of the Professions (with C. Bazerman, Wisconsin 1991); and Samuel Butler: Victorian against the Grain (Toronto 2007). Prof. Paradis teaches CMS.950: Graduate Workshop I; CMS.375/875: Reading Climate through Media; CMS.376/876: History of Media and Technology; and CMS.S61/S97: Transmedia Art; Extraction, and Environmental Justice.  

Co-Director

Eric Gordon

Visiting Professor CMS/W

Eric Gordon is a visiting professor in Comparative Media Studies / Writing. He is also a professor of civic media and the director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College in Boston. His research focuses on the transformation of public life and governance in digital culture, specifically looking at the context of equitable and generative “smart cities.” For the last ten years, Professor Gordon has explored the role of play and creativity in civic life, looking at how game systems and playful processes can augment traditional modes of civic participation. He has served as an expert advisor for local and national governments, as well as NGOs around the world, designing responsive processes that help organizations transform to meet their stated values. He has created over a dozen games for public sector use and advised organizations on how to build their own inclusive and meaningful processes. He is the author of two books about media and cities (The Urban Spectator (2010) and Net Locality (2011)) and is the editor of Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016) and the forthcoming Ludics: Play as Humanistic Inquiry (Palgrave, 2020). His most recent monograph, Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines an emerging care ethics in public innovation. He received his Ph.D. in media studies in 2003 from the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.