The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is hosting an on-campus screening of the Oscar-nominated film, Sugarcane, on Tuesday April 29 at 4:30pm on the 6^th floor of the Samberg Center in Dining Rooms 5&6. The event, sponsored by MIT SHASS, is free but please register here.

Documentary filmmaker, Executive Producer of Sugarcane, and MIT Corporation member, David Fialkow, will be on hand to introduce the film. The screening will be followed by a brief Q&A with a faculty, student, and staff panel. A reception with refreshments will follow. 

For any questions or accessibility needs, please contact cbsoll@mit.edu.

About the presentation: A recent survey shows the US ranks 36th in global literacy. While serving on MIT's Educational Council, Christine saw a growing number of urban and rural students entering 12th grade without the appropriate skills. She wondered: what if you took literacy and STEAM concepts and embedded them in an epic adventure? And what if the characters were different than those seen in traditional literature? Ten years later, the Lost Tribes was published. The first books were used during an MIT summer middle school program. In addition, one librarian reported a student whose reading score doubled. Come learn how an MIT engineer switched gears mid-career to help grow a new generation of independent readers.

Christine is completing her second year as an MLK Scholar sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.

This event is hybrid. Please choose your ticket accordingly.

Maps are typically tools of the powerful, created by governments or large corporations to reflect and reinforce the status quo. This talk is an exploration of how new kinds of cartography can challenge the entrenched politics of mainstream mapping. By combining historical research on the history of data maps with Rankin’s own work as a cartographer over the last twenty years, it argues that contemporary cartography should be guided not just by new data or new technology, but by a new set of values.

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation! No need to RSVP: just show up and bring your friends! 

To stimulate rural development, the Indian state of West Bengal is promoting homestay tourism in the district of Kalimpong, on the state’s mountainous margins. This talk situates the homestay market within a broader late capitalist “economy of retreat.” The economy of retreat is an analytical framework for considering the re-valuation of domestic space amid interlinked agrarian, economic, and climate crises. As climate change upends rural livelihoods and threatens urban livability, domestic spaces, and domestic labors, have become renewed sites of political and economic potential. The economy of retreat entails a meeting of urban anxiety with agrarian precarity. This turns homes into environmentally and socially volatile spaces, but also into spaces of new speculative opportunity. Attention to this double movement permits scholars to trace the relationship between capitalism and climate change not in disaster or salvage accumulation but in the material and affective work of remaining in place.

In person at Brookline Booksmith! Celebrate the release of Predatory Data with author Anita Say Chan, in conversation with Héctor Beltrán.

Register for the event!
RSVP to let us know you're coming! Depending on the volume of responses, an RSVP may be required for entrance to the event. You will also be alerted to important details about the program, including safety requirements, cancellations, and book signing updates. In the event that we reach capacity and have to close RSVPs, there will not be a waiting list.

Please join MIT Anthropology Professor Sonya Atalay (CBIKS founder & director) for the first Indigenous Sciences Speaker Series speaker of 2025.

This talk shares insights from a collaborative field school bringing together students and Tribal members from the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and their Land Trust. Informed by cultural perspectives and priorities, participants learned archaeological field methods developed by the Tribe and archaeologists over the last decade to study and preserve Indigenous cultural heritage.

America has been, historically, a land of trees. This made its built environment thoroughgoingly wooden and, as a consequence, alarmingly combustible. In the same way that fossil fuels are today the source of our abundance but also the cause of a dreaded apocalypse, wood was the source of American abundance and the cause of constant, harrowing fires. In This Too Shall Burn, Daniel Immerwahr asks how those hair-raising fires have shaped—or scarred—the American past.

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation! No need to RSVP: just show up with your friends! 

Join the MIT PKG Public Service Center and the MIT Women's League us as we wrap up IAP with a screening of Little Women (2019) where we keep the lights up and bring our crafting projects to work while we watch! Professor Heather Paxson will introduce our screening with remarks on women's crafting and work through history.

This event is free and open to the MIT Community. Please register to attend.

Popcorn will be provided!

What can we do at MIT to prepare our students to solve the challenges of their time? Every learner at MIT can impact the future of humankind and the planet—calling on us to embrace new approaches to an MIT education.

At the 2025 Festival of Learning, hear from MIT faculty, instructors, and recent students about what mens et manus looks like in the future of teaching and learning at MIT. Join a facilitated session to improve teaching and learning at the Institute. 

Transportation and logistics today are factored as part of (and not something that follows) the production of goods. 

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research with cheese importers and exporters, this lecture follows the work of moving perishable foods into the United States as a job of navigating border regulation and employing cold chain technology to preserve perishable values: the edibility and palatability of fragile foods as well as the commodity value of goods. 

MIT Anthropology is grateful for the opportunity to co-sponsor the Indigenous Sciences Speaker Series talks with the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Sciences, CBIKS, at UMASS Amherst (Director: MIT Anthropology Professor Sonya Atalay)

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation! No need to RSVP; just show up and bring your friends!

Jesse Pirini (Māori), a Senior Lecturer at the Wellington School of Business and Government at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand and co-Editor for the edited volume Indigenous Management: Knowledges and Frameworks (in press), will be presenting Weaving Western and Indigenous Business Lenses: Self-Determination and Solutions for a Better Society. 

Abstract: Indigenous businesses and organizations are developing approaches to successful management and organization to support self-determination. Indigenous ways of knowing and doing also help address urgent societal challenges including sustainability, climate change, inclusion and innovation. In this presentation Jesse shares practical examples from Aotearoa, New Zealand of Indigenous perspectives braided with popular management thinking to support self-determination. Considering successes, challenges and discussing future pathways for research and practice. 

Join us for an event exploring the future of cheesemaking in the face of climate change, featuring speakers from Switzerland and New England.

As climate change reshapes agriculture and food production across the globe, what does the future hold for cheese? Will sustainable practices for traditional cheesemaking be compatible with our climate goals? Does the future lie with plant-based cheese? This event dives into how producers in Switzerland and New England are rethinking cheesemaking in the face of rapid climate and planetary shifts. Join cheesemakers, sellers, and fellow cheese enthusiasts to explore whether traditional and cutting-edge approaches to cheesemaking can co-exist on our warming planet.

In his book Code Work, Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders’ personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work.