Projects investigating Swahili, global media win SHASS Humanities Awards

The awards offer opportunities to expand research into unique areas of scholarship. Two projects - the Global Mediations Lab led by Paul Roquet and the MIT Swahili Studies Initiative led by Per Urlaub - have won Humanities Awards from the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The pilot program, launched in fall 2023, aims to support humanities-focused, collaborative projects that can have a broad impact within SHASS or MIT, or have a substantial impact on undergraduate education. Each winning project receives up to $100,000 in funding. Paul Roquet: Investigating media and information impacts. Paul Roquet is the project lead for the Global Mediations Lab, which will enable a globe-spanning study of media texts, industries, and infrastructure. These studies, Roquet asserts, will reach beyond what he describes as "the usual focus on anglophone North America and Europe" to "map the global media landscape in its moments of contestation and transformation." "The big, difficult question here is how to enable a more fully global understanding of media technologies - how these tools are used for good and ill, in ways both predictable and unforeseen," he says.