Workshop with visiting scholar, Bianca Vienni-Baptista register here

Workshop with Visting Scholar Dr. Bianca Vienni-Baptista. Can a shift in how we understand interdisciplinarity and its transformative potential enhance its impact on funding and policy? This talk elaborates on three key dimensions through which such a shift can illuminate the connections and disconnections among interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research practices, evaluation systems, funding schemes, and policy processes. The approach emphasizes deeper attention to how meaning is created, negotiated, and contested across diverse contexts and among various societal actors.

Abstract: Did disenchantment lead to “climate change”? In The States of the Earth (2024), Mohamed Amer Meziane argues that secularization, which European colonialism engendered, paved the way for the environmental crisis. Exploring the history of 19th century imperialism, he shows how Western-European empire-states claimed to be “secular” while they entered the “age of coal”, thus employing Orientalism as a way of racializing subjects and converting them, not only to Christianity, but to a fossilized world called “civilization”. Hence: If the so-called secular age is a carbon era, then isn’t the Anthropocene a Secularocene?

What makes a research collaboration not only successful but mutually rewarding across disciplinary divides? As complex challenges call for diverse expertise, scholars face increasing demands to work across epistemological, methodological, and cultural boundaries. This participatory workshop, sponsored by the SHASS Dean's office and the Office of the Executive Vice Provost, invites current and prospective collaborators to reflect on and strengthen the foundations of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research. 

All are invited to this participatory workshop on HASS-STEM collaborations. Laura Frye-Levine (research scientist in Anthropology) will host as part of a two-week series of events this month on transdisciplinary collaboration. With Dr. Bianca Vienni-Baptista, visiting from ETH Zurich. Please register in advance

Workshop convened with visiting scholar, Dr. Bianca Vienni-Baptista: please register here

As interdisciplinary collaborations become central to addressing complex challenges in climate, energy, and sustainability, the role of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) is more crucial—and more contested—than ever. This participatory workshop, hosted as part of the SHASS Sustainability Lunch series, invites SSH and STEM researchers to co-develop practical strategies for more effective engagement with scientists and engineers. 

Who Should Attend: Researchers interested in shaping the future of interdisciplinary collaboration at MIT and beyond.

This participatory workshop brings together MIT Climate Project leads, research staff, and SHASS faculty, researchers, and PhD students to initiate a shared conversation around key conceptual frameworks in climate and energy research. The goal is to begin building relationships of trust and deepen mutual understanding across disciplines through collaborative reflection on how core terms are used and interpreted. Registration required.

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

Smartphones enable social actors to initiate, pause, or resume communication at virtually any time and from almost any location, embedding mobile communication in a wide range of everyday social practices. This workshop takes the ongoing Swiss research project Texting in Time: Communicative Practices of Smartphone Interactions in Process as a point of departure to explore the sociolinguistics of mobile communication, with particular attention to the temporalities and rhythms of everyday messaging. 

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

The U.S. National Science Foundation Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (NSF CBIKS) invites you to the fourth speaker in the Indigenous Sciences Speaker Series: Dr. Kiana Frank. Kiana Frank - born and raised in Kailua Oʻahu – studies how microorganisms shape ʻāina (land) for productivity and health by weaving contemporary western techniques with Native Hawaiian Science. Her work evaluates overall ecosystem health and informs current monitoring, restoration, cultivation, and management of Hawaiian resources to sustainably support the people of Hawaii.

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.