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  • Faculty

    Nitin Sawhney

    Assistant Professor

    PhD, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Nitin Sawhney

    Assistant Professor of Media Studies. Nitin’s research, teaching and creative practice engages the critical role of technology, artistic interventions and DIY cultures among communities in contested spaces. He previously taught at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology and conducted research at the MIT Media Lab on networked collaboration for sustainable product design, ubiquitous computing and responsive media in urban spaces. Nitin is a research affiliate with the MIT Center for Civic Media, where he co-founded the Department of Play, a research collaborative, to design participatory mobile video, mapping and pedagogical tools to support creative expression and civic agency among marginalized youth. Since 2006 he established the Voices Beyond Walls initiative to conduct digital storytelling and youth media workshops in Palestinian refugee camps. In 2008-2009, Nitin conceptualized the Media Barrios project as a Visionary Fellow with the Jerusalem 2050 initiative at MIT, conducting research on media arts intervention in divided cities including Jerusalem, Belfast and Berlin. He recently began a pilot research study in the West Bank and Gaza on the role of participatory media for resilience and civic agency among children and adolescents living in conditions of conflict and crisis. Nitin is currently completing a documentary film, Flying Paper, about the participatory culture of kite making among children in Gaza, with support from National Geographic.  

    Recent Publications

    • Nitin Sawhney, Raed Yacoub, Julie M. Norman.  "Jerusalem and Belfast: Envisioning Media Arts for Urban Renewal and Cultural Identity in Divided Cities," The Jerusalem Quarterly Journal, Institute for Jerusalem Studies, October 2009, Issue 39. pp 62-80
    • Nitin Sawhney. "Voices Beyond Walls: The Role of Digital Storytelling for Empowering Marginalized Youth in Refugee Camps," International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, Workshop on Digital Technologies and Marginalized Youth, June 3–5, 2009, Como, Italy
    • Nitin Sawhney, Saul Griffith, Yael Maguire and Timothy Prestero. "ThinkCycle: Sharing Distributed Design Knowledge for Open Collaborative Design," International Journal of Technologies for the Advancement of Knowledge and Learning (TechKnowLogia), Jan 2002, Vol. 4 Issue 1. pp. 49-53
    • Nitin Sawhney, Sean Wheeler and Chris Schmandt. "Aware Community Portals: Shared Information Appliances for Transitional Space," Springer-Verlag Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, February 2001, Vol. 5, Issue 1. pp. 66-70
    • Nitin Sawhney, David Balcom and Ian Smith. "Authoring and Navigating Video in Space and Time," IEEE Multimedia Journal, October-December 1997, Vol. 4, Issue 4. pp. 30-39

    Research Interests

    Participatory media technologies, collaborative learning platforms, creative DIY cultures, civic media and artistic intervention in conflict and crisis, responsive media and tactical design in urban public spaces, mobile video and speech/audio interaction, hybrid documentary film practice, digital storytelling and resilience among marginalized children and adolescents in global contexts, creative activism and civic agency among youth in the Middle East.

    Professional Affiliations

    • Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Insititute of Technology
    • Member, International Sociological Association

    Awards and Honors

    • Seed grant for documentary film “Flying Paper” awarded by the National Geographic All Roads Film Project, May 12, 2011
    • Jerusalem Visionary Fellowship awarded by the MIT Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for International Studies, 2008-2009
    • Dedication to Activism through the Arts awarded for the Boston Palestine Film Festival (co-founder) by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, May 31, 2008
    • Martin Fellow for Sustainability awarded by the Martin Family Foundation and the MIT Laboratory for Energy and Environment, 2002-2003
    • First Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGWEB Hypertext Conference for “HyperCafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo,” March 1996 

Nitin Sawhney

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