Creating Technology for Social Change

Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock, civic media specialist, joins MIT faculty

An exciting announcement just via MIT Comparative Media Studies director Jim Paradis. Costanza-Chock will work closely with the Center starting with his arrival this fall:

Comparative Media Studies at MIT is pleased to announce that Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Civic Media and will begin teaching at MIT in the fall of 2011.

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a scholar and media maker who works in the interrelated areas of social movements and information and communication technologies; participatory technology design and community based participatory research; and the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights, including comunicación populár.

His work has involved the use of mobile phones for social change; digital literacies and digital inclusion; and race, class, and gender in digital space. He has done research on the transformation of public media systems; the political economy of communication; and information and communications policy.

Dr. Costanza-Chock holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate; he is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he has worked on a variety of civic media projects with community-based organizations, including the award-winning VozMob.net platform <http://vozmob.net/en/about>. More information about Sasha’s work can be found at http://schock.cc.