Malcom Moffat College of Education

Items

• Red Star Rising: The Coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev by U.S. Network Television, 1984-86
  My dissertation presents a case study of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's coverage by U.S. television news. This work aims to increase the current understanding of both the effect of politicians on the media, and the effect of the press on policy making. My dissertation addresses three main questions. First, how did Gorbachev cultivate positive media coverage from the American press? Second, what kind of coverage did the American media give Gorbachev? Third, did the press coverage have an effect on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union? I limited my examination to Gorbachev's first two years in power, when I theorized that the effect of the media would be greatest, and to television news because it is the single largest source of news for the American citizenry. I performed a content analysis of nearly 900 network evening news reports on Gorbachev, 150 of which I viewed on tape, and interviewed journalists, policy makers and academics--both in the United States and Soviet Union-about Gorbachev's tactics and their effect. I found that Gorbachev used the media strategically to further his policy goals. Even before he assumed the office of General Secretary of the Communist Party, Gorbachev began a deliberate campaign to solicit positive public opinion at home and in the West. Although Gorbachev was continually introducing new tactics during the time period of this study, not everything that he did was "strategic" in nature -that is to say, not everything Gorbachev did to cultivate press coverage created an effect or impression above and beyond the content of his message. In 1984 and 1985, Gorbachev's cultivation of media coverage was far more strategic than in 1986. Gorbachev's emphasis on image and his attraction of positive press coverage affected both the style and substance of Soviet-American relations. "It [the press] has an effect on policy," as one Reagan administration official put it·. The Reagan administration responded to Gorbachev by trying to neutralize Gorbachev's popularity. This response included policy actions, such as the renewed effort at arms control negotiations which later led to a treaty on intermediate range nuclear weapons. But the President also sought to match Gorbachev's momentum stylistically in what the networks termed "the battle for world public opinion."
• Deconstructing a Landscape Out-of-Place: the Afterlife of Rural Hollowing
  This thesis explores declining villages in the process towards rural hollowing. Rural hollowing, this phenomenon exhibits increasingly in depopulating rural settlements, results from fading infrastructural services, disintegrating population structure, and incremental land abandonment. The project emphasizes against the current capitalist-oriented tourism scheme and proposes landscape architecture as a medium to remediate the disintegrating village by recognizing these rural villages’ declining reality: by reintegrating its public service infrastructure and formulating a sustainable farming economy. This thesis looks at a village in rural Fujian, China and explores landscape architecture’s agency in rebuilding abandoned rural spaces in reformulating village composition and creating a place for a community that is smaller but in a life that is still rich in culture.
• John Andrews's Laconic Legacy
  John Hamilton Andrews (1933–) is the quintessential knockabout Australian; terse and straight-forward, his affable personality won him the respect of his American peers and mentors, but his laconic sensibility would ultimately prove a liability later in his career. His brevity in publication as well as a reluctance to theorize or historicize his work would frustrate later attempts to situate his career and projects within American modernist or brutalist narratives. This thesis places the importance of communication—how design is spoken, drawn, performed, and published—at its core: how does a given architect communicate her/his work and how do those efforts impact the reception of the architect and the architect’s oeuvre? The thesis examines Andrews’s work through several modes of communication by cataloging and analyzing diagrams and drawings, published writings, interviews, and audiovisual recordings produced by Andrews’s practice between 1962 and 1982. These materials serve as valuable evidence in understanding the rapid early success of the practice and the practice’s transition, between the years 1964 and 1969, from elaborately rendered sections to easily comprehensible sectional diagrams—an innovation in visual communication which prefigured a later trend towards diagram architecture. The legible section diagram, in the built form of Gund Hall (1968–1972), is Andrews’s most important contribution to the Harvard Graduate School of Design; a contribution that has since been overlooked in part because of its poor reception upon completion, but also due to Andrews’s reluctance to engage in the forms of communication necessary to sustain an understanding and reception of his work. Communication explains both his early success and his difficult legacy.
• The Construction of an Image
  This thesis investigates the agency of the photograph and the passage of time to imagine the future life of a building. The project adopts a reflexive image-based method that is simultaneously contingent on the past and projective of a future that demands the participation of the audience’s imagination. The method prioritizes narrative and storytelling, offering a new way of comprehending and registering the life of a building over a longer period of time. Photographic realism is utilized as part of this approach, constructing fictional archives of the past and future that coexist with and register one another.
• Go Listen to the Mountain: Propagating the Sacred from 'Holler to Hilltop
  Go Listen to the Mountain is a journey intended to enliven in people dormant sacred landscape relationships that are critical for successful ecological stewardship. Located in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains, it proposes a seven-stage walking trail that uses its varied topographical conditions to cultivate and distribute diverse communities of regionally significant plants. The sites are also choreographed to provide a cyclical energetic experience designed to iteratively weave new sacred human-landscape relationships by people’s movement through the seven stages, as well as their participation in a three-part ritual at each: the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of that specific plant community. As people and plants go forth beyond the trail, they seed the world with the meanings and relationships generated upon it.
• Halftone Dissonance
  This thesis aims to induce a public conversation in the public sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic public health policies and social isolation altered the way people interact, while consumer culture has increased and shifted. We are continuously exposed to massive amounts of information that can be easily manipulated. Our thesis installation presents critical figures that can transform our day-to-day life; however, it is up to the viewer on which portrait they align with. As designers, we want to expose two opposing points of view on a controversial topic and bring it to the public sphere following Chantal Mouffeís writings in Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space1, in which public spaces are always plural. Our installation is an intervention in a pluralistic public space. Rather than an agnostic approach, our project translates controversial topics into complex geometry. The goal is to identify a problem and situate our specific intervention to address that issue. The medium is an installation that was created with rigorous amounts of digital manipulation through the 3D plane and CNCing production methods. The two sides of the board juxtapose Governer Kochul and the real estate mogul Stephen M. Ross and their stances on the 421A Tax Abatement law about the post-pandemic world, where the socioeconomic disparity also refers to the post-pandemic world is accelerated at an unprecedented pace (source: IMF). Our intervention aims to enact a public conversation and inform the public about the 421A policy. We let the viewers of our project decide which side they are supporting through the daytime and nighttime readings. During the day, the installation will reveal itself as an obscured image of Governer Kochul, while the nighttime reading will reveal an obscured image of Stephen M. Ross. An informative and interactive website accompanies the installation.
• Governing the night-time city: The rise of night mayors as a new form of urban governance after dark
  Keywords urban governance, planning, urban night, nightlife, night mayor
• Climate Change, Aging, and Well-being: How Residential Setting Matters.
  How do older people’s living environments influence their vulnerabilities to climate change? Much has been written about the physiological consequences of climate change for older individuals, particularly the dangers of increased incidence of severe heat. Less is known about how older people’s residential settings moderate their exposure to climate stressors, their particular sensitivities to the effects of climate change, or their capacities to respond to extreme events or adapt to long-term environmental changes. Drawing on literature in English, with a focus on work relevant to the United States, we examine how the housing, neighborhood, and urban or rural contexts in which older people live shape their experiences of climate change, moderating their exposure to risks related to climate change, sensitivity to those events and trends, and their capacities to adapt and recover. Older people face multiple life changes, making prioritizing climate readiness more challenging. They are also diverse, with different vulnerabilities and perceptions of risks and the ability to manage them. This paper lays out an agenda where additional research can inform policy and planning efforts aimed at reducing older individuals’ risk and building the capacity to adapt to climate change. The agenda includes understanding specific vulnerabilities and how older people and their housing providers are already responding.
• Land Form Architecture: Bridging the Narrative of Korean Urbanism
  Korea, as compact as one could imagine, is dominated by housing complexes that resemble factories of living cells. These literal house-building machines constructed through re-useable concrete formwork are endlessly repeated that one is hardly able to identify which house belongs to whom. Further, infinitely duplicated housing-machines are in the process of construction waiting to operate every day. In the absence of other architectural agendas, economical and functional efficiency is the only algorithm that defines the characteristics of apartments. Relentless homogeneity of urban fabrics generates monotonous scenery of daily life and community networks are severed by their distribution inside strictly partitioned structural frames. While the sole purpose of the housing complex is the production of more housing, in effect it imposes an ideology of extreme isolation, disconnection, and discretization by its masterplan, circulations, forms, and construction methods altogether. The question becomes how to leverage the existing socio-economic infrastructure and its architectural typologies to roduce different social and spatial outcomes. The intellectual tradition of horizontality shows us a possible for opportunities of the integration. When the typical apartment complexes are regularized stacks of living cells, horizontality would allow communal, cultural, and social programs to penetrate, stitch, and interact with the existing repeated blocks. By doing so, programmatic coherence and collision would provide new types of relationship within the larger urban landscape, and between people and the built environment. This thesis investigates on the built environment of contemporary society in Korea, and proposes a new typology driven by the idea of ‘horizontality.’ By deconstructing and re-formulating the relationship between form and program, the new prototype of Korean cultural park will suggest a new possibility of urban life in Korea.
• Mall Fall: A Sharing Ecosystem for Collective Living
  The suburban shopping mall, once a prototypical feature of the American suburban landscape, has been in decline for several decades. Like a whale carcass which is dissected and shared by numerous organisms, the dead mall offers a concentrated opportunity for a new ecosystem through the occupation and transformation of the large structure. Using the Greece Ridge Mall in Rochester, New York, this thesis imagines this ecosystem by redefining suburban everyday practices of sharing into forms of collective living: from potlucks and hosting students to community classes and home businesses. Applying adaptive reuse strategies to retrofit the anchor stores, concourses, and mall architecture, the project questions both the spatial form of increasingly important sharing behaviors and the picture of housing in suburbia. Behaviors, from sharing a fridge to sharing a spare room, gradually create a complex ecosystem to enrich the new residents and surrounding community until the mall is completely shared.
• 100-Day Exhibition: Labor, Robots, and Corridors
  This thesis proposes a weird, giant, and cycling memorial spectacle with the introduction of a new sort of labor in the format of a 100-day exhibition. The robotic machines replaced the enslaved persons to run a closed system of deconstruction and reconstruction: a constant displacement of architectural productions. The whole island is a museum. The exhibition is a constantly work-in-progress construction. LABORS Hashima Island was a self-sufficient company town run by Mitsubishi. While being approved as a World Heritage Site as part of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution, it is also a site of forced labor before and during World War II. In 1974, the mines were closed, the island became a ghost town. ROBOTS Compared to human labor, robotic labor is highly efficient, emotionless, and precise. It is good at copy & paste and making mistakes perfectly without knowing it. To make a contrast between human labor’s logic and the programmed robots’ logic, asking the robots to repeat the perfect flaws to build the structural modules is the core constructive method for this exhibition. CORRIDORS The corridor is not only circulation and servant space. It should be considered as an organizational device for facilitating public interaction while maintaining a divider for separating the private and public at the same time. The corridor wants to be a room as well. In this thesis, the “new” serves as the XL corridor filled in the interstitial spaces between the existing residential buildings. The cluster of buildings becomes a single building with a matrix of connected modules and non-typical corridors.
• The Fear of AIDS
• Micro-affirmations & Micro-inequities
• Harassment at MIT: Think Prevention
• Dealing with the Fear of Violence: What an Organizational Ombudsman Might Want to Know
• People with Delusions or Quasi-Delusions Who "Won't Let Go"
  In recent years an increasing number of otherwise productive people, who appear to have delusions or quasi-delusions and who "won't let go," have come to the attention of workplace and university complaint handlers. These are people who have ideas which appear contrary to fact, and who, in addition, seem obsessed about these ideas. Complaint handlers come to hear about this sub-group of obsessed people with delusions or quasi-delusions in two ways. People with obsessive delusions may come in as complainants, and then continuously refuse to settle or give up the complaint. This may be true even after a court has ruled against them. Or they may be reported to the complaint handler as harassers when they follow, skulk, stalk, scare or anger others, and apparently cannot be persuaded to give up the object of their interest. There has been little published in the human resource or dispute resolution literature about otherwise productive persons who present in workplace or academic settings as both obsessed and quasi-delusional. In this article, the author sketches out characteristics of a specific group of people who have some obsessive beliefs and ideas that appear not to be based in reality. She suggests some ways individual complaint handlers and organizations may deal with questions and concerns posed by such persons.
• BELONGING—The Feeling That We ‘Belong’ May Depend in Part on ‘Affirmations'
  This essay describes a poignant concern brought to the ombuds office that helped me to understand how micro-affirmations are a major part of the scaffolding of “belonging.”
• Concerns about Bullying at Work As Heard by Organizational Ombudsmen
• The Progress of Women in Educational Institutions: The Saturn's Rings Phenomenon
  This December 1973 report by Mary Rowe to the MIT Academic Council contributed to the discussion resulting in MIT's first policy against harassment. The article describes various aspects of structural sexism.
• Using Organizational Values and Mission to Guide Strategic Planning
  ISKCON Resolve is part of a global, integrated conflict management system serving congregations in a hundred countries for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. This global system began in 2002—and is the only one of its kind in a worldwide faith-based organization. ISKCON Resolve is led by two organizational ombuds, Brian Bloch and Bob Cohen. They respond to visitors; train, serve and supervise dozens of mediators; and support the Governing Body Commission of the faith. This essay describes an event at which the two ombuds were supporting their incoming CEO in strategic planning for conflict management.
• Helping Hesitant Bystanders Identify Their Options: A Checklist with Examples and Ideas to Consider
  Organizational bystanders sometimes act heroically in emergencies. Less well known are the bystanders who act very effectively, in quiet ways, in reaction to (potentially) unacceptable behavior. In addition, many bystanders (and bystanders of bystanders) consider action, but hesitate. There are many reasons why hesitation is understandable and may be appropriate. However, in many situations, hesitation can turn into effective action. Drawing on examples from ombuds practice, this article aims to assist organizational ombuds in helping hesitant bystanders identify and evaluate their options. The article includes a checklist of questions for hesitant bystanders that ombuds may find useful—and adds to the literature about why bystanders do or do not decide to act after learning of unacceptable behavior. The checklist may also be useful to those engaged in training programs for bystanders and others who provide support to hesitant bystanders.
• Are You Hearing Enough Employee Concerns?
  This article provides an overview of non-union complaint systems in the U.S.
• “'Drafting a Letter' for People Dealing with Harassment or Bullying"
  As an early ombuds, the author discovered that drafting a structured letter about being mistreated often helped constituents—with respect to both process and outcomes. This article describes the origins of “drafting a letter” with its uses, benefits, and sources of power. Drafting such a letter provides a tripartite structure (see the Appendix) for a mistreated person to present evidence—from diaries, calendars, communications, videos, photos, phone records, etc. This structure helps in considering many options for action, for example, just thinking things through, gathering more evidence, informal discussions, mediation, or a formal complaint. Or the writer may send the letter privately to the perceived offender; such letters may work to stop specific misbehavior. If the behavior then does not stop, a safe-guarded copy of the letter can be used as evidence that the writer tried to stop it. And—very importantly—just drafting a letter may help with pain, anger, and grief.
• Consider Generic Options When Complainants and Bystanders Are Fearful
  Organizational ombuds usually offer a choice of different options to constituents who call the office with a concern. In serious cases, ombuds might offer formal options such as filing a formal grievance. In addition, the ombuds can offer informal options, such as helping a visitor deal directly with their concern or offering to facilitate discussion with those involved. However, aggrieved persons and proactive bystanders often are very fearful about anyone knowing they have complained. In this situation, a “generic” approach—that focuses on an issue without naming anyone—can help to address the issues involved rather than the individuals. This can be done in ways that shield the privacy of the complainant. In addition to helping individuals, generic options serve affinity groups and the organization by supporting needed systemic improvements. This article discusses how organizational ombuds and other complaint handlers can use generic approaches in their work.
• The Progress of Women in Educational Institutions: The Saturn's Rings Phenomenon
  The minutiae of sexism are usually not actionable; most are such petty incidents that they may not even be identified, much less protested. They are, however, important, like the dust and ice in Saturn's rings, because, taken together, they constitute formidable barriers. As Saturn is partially obscured by its rings, so are good jobs partially obscured for women by "grains of sand": the minutiae of sexism.