Candis Callison is a graduate student in the Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a year of ethnographic research supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine, she is now in the midst of writing her dissertation.

Tenatively titled “Spinning Climate Change: How groups are using media, science, and public relations to engage the American public,” Candis' dissertation looks at the communication of climate change to Americans through the lens of three distinct social groups that are outside mainstream environmentalism or policy/government frameworks.  The differences between the focal groups are stark and important, and allow for significant discussion and analysis regarding key issues confronting media, science, and spaces for public debate and engagement.  Candis has also spent a considerable amount of time interviewing science journalists and scientists to better understand the process by which scientific issues become public, and get invested with meaning, ideology, and a potential roadmap for solutions.  What her research as a whole seeks to understand is how climate change has moved beyond traditional ideals of scientific authority to the realm of meaning-making; and the ways in which media as a result of new technologies and fragmentation provide a more robust field in which activists and individuals are productively relating environmental issues and scientific facts to everyday life and societal structures.

Prior to STS, Candis completed a master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies at MIT focusing on issues related to visual culture, media convergence, and digital representations of the environment. Her thesis, A Digital Assemblage: Diagramming the Social Realities of the Stikine Watershed looked at the Stikine River area as a condition for relating factors of knowledge, discourse, and power. The Stikine is home to the Tahltan and Tlingit Nations, sparsely populated, and under immense development pressure from mining interests. The thesis was both technical and theoretical, and involved collecting ethnographic interviews and data, designing a web-based demonstration project, and producing an extensive written description and theoretical explanation.  Based on Candis' media interests and background, the project sought to understand and experiment with what the digital realm offered for visually representing and geographically situating overlapping perspectives and heterogeneous forms of environment-related media and data.

Candis' professional background previous to graduate school includes seven years of producing, writing, and reporting for television, the Internet, and radio in Canada (CBC, CTV, APTN) and the United States (Lycos, Tech TV). She also had the truly wonderful opportunity to collaborate with the brilliant artist Brian Jungen on educational comic books. For her early work in media convergence, Candis was profiled in the 2003 book, Technology with Curves: Women Reshaping the Digital Landscape. Her independently produced film Traditional Renaissance (1995) was included in UBC Museum of Anthropology's 2003-04 exhibition on Tahltan culture, Mehodihi: Our Great Ancestors Lived that Way.

During her time in graduate school, she has published on network society theories and information technology issues , and investigated several other topics including, GPS technology as a tool for structuring perception, the debate over offshore oil drilling in northwestern British Columbia, and the science and technology used in salmon management in the Pacific Northwest. From 2000-02, Candis was selected by National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation as the CN Aboriginal Scholar and in 2004-05, she was a Martin Family Fellow for Sustainability.

Born and raised in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, Candis is a member of the Tahltan Nation located in northwestern B.C. These days, she lives with her husband and their nearly five-year old daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts sometimes, and Vancouver mostly.

Candis can be reached by email at candis-at-mit-dot-edu.