Our Work
Multimodal Scholarship
One of MASCLab's primary goals is to push the boundaries of how scholarship is defined and circulated. The Multimodal Scholarship Working Group advances that goal: a supportive learning community where members share in-process multimodal research and puzzle through how knowledge can be represented in new, creative, and public ways.
Contact: Lucius Von Joo
Multimodal Scholarship Projects
Unlearning
Presented at the Screening Scholarship Media Festival and International Society of the Learning Sciences Annual Meeting in 2026, Unlearning is an interactive gallery that provocatively introduces (un)learning as an active, political, communal process through collaborative collage-making. It invites the visitors to engage with 17 original collages created by members of the Multimodal Scholarship Working Group, each exploring personal journeys when default settings, rituals, or learnings suddenly felt odd. Unlearning gallery also offers a collaborative collage—a dialogue that we started in the MASCLab and to which attendees are invited to take part through making and collaging.
Digital Ecologies of Hope
Digital Ecologies of Hope is a collaboratively produced field guide that documents how people use media to sustain care, resilience, and imagination in the face of technological, political, and social constraints. Drawing inspiration from naturalist field guides and critical fabulation, the project reinterprets everyday practices as “specimens” of digital hope, each annotated with classifications, habitats, conservation statuses, field notes, and illustrations. These specimens span diverse contexts—from Sudanese youth defending theses during the civil war to Afro-Brazilian students reclaiming identity in elite institutions, to transgender voice archives on TikTok and youth activist networks resisting surveillance in schools. Rather than reinforcing dominant techno-pessimism, this guide foregrounds how digital practices foster agency and solidarity, often emerging most vividly in conditions of constraint. By offering an accessible, multimodal archive, the project reimagines media research as an act of care, collective meaning-making, and future-oriented scholarship. Convergence Full Text PDF - Digital Ecologies of Hope
The Hope Tree
The Hope Tree, designed by lab member Shell Avenant, was a monument to collective hope displayed in front of the Grottesman Libraries in Fall 2025. In the Spring semester of 2025, lab members crafted a multimodal journal submission titled Digital Ecologies of Hope: An Anthology of Illustrated Examples of Digital Media Usage that inspired lab members’ hope for the future. This practice of attending to hope in the current political climate became the focus of the lab’s end-of-year showcase, MediaFest 2025. The Hope Tree was assembled from fallen tree branches, gathered days before MediaFest when a gas leak near campus fortuitously pushed the MASCLab’s weekly meeting out into a local greenspace.
Media and Civic Engagement
MASCLab's Media & Civic Engagement research group explores how media are woven into everyday civic and political life. We're interested in how people's relationships with media shape the way they understand themselves and the world—and how those understandings, in turn, shape the way they use media. We pay particular attention to how this back-and-forth affects whether people see themselves as civic and political actors: how they form their identities, make sense of social and political issues, and imagine and take part in collective action.
Contact: Madeline McGee Stillman
Media and Civic Engagement Projects
Lamboozled!
Grounded in current research on news literacy and youth media practices, LAMBOOZLED! is a deck-building card game set in the fictional sheep town of Green Meadows — where, as the game’s tagline reads, “some news stories just want to pull the wool over your eyes!” Players must help the sheep citizens of Green Meadows figure out what’s true and what’s not, by using their best evidence to win them over. Now available from Teachers College Press.
Activism and Civic Engagement on Social Media Platforms
A key interest for the Media and Civic Engagement research group is how social media shapes young people’s opportunities to engage with political issues. For example, we have explored how social media users advocate for women's issues in China, focusing on the activism against menstrual shaming on the social media platform Xiaohongshu, a culturally significant but understudied platform used primarily by women. We have also investigated how Chinese youth perceive and engage with news content on short-form video platforms, shedding light on their complex and often contradictory news practices.
MediaFest
MediaFest is MASCLab’s annual celebration of media-making, multimodal scholarship, and community imagination. Each spring, we showcase lab members’ explorations and experimentations at the intersection of media and social change–in all their playful, speculative, and weird forms.
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