The Poetic Justice Group (PJG), founded by artist Ekene Ijeoma, is accepting applications for their two-year funded (tuition, medical insurance, and a stipend) research assistantship and graduate student program.
We’re looking for both thinkers and makers of all types who are passionate about breaking down the complexities of social issues and building visibility, accountability, and solidarity around them. Applicants should already be thinking critically about their disciplines and continually searching for cross-disciplinary connections. Although not required, we’re particularly interested in applicants with professional experience.

PJG explores new forms of justice through art. PJG questions, if “Artists need to create on the same scale as society has the capacity to destroy,” as Sherrie Rabinowitz suggested in 1984, then how can social justice be expanded through conceptual art informed by computational and architectural design strategies? As some mediums are better for some messages than others, we question what new media should be used for these new forms of social justice. If a new form of social justice is searching for our truths, how can we find them at the intersections of oral histories and data studies? How can we create artworks which engage with and furthermore embody these truths? How can the forms of these artworks function at the intersections of poetic acts and analytic insights as well as aesthetic quality and social efficacy?

Some of our ongoing projects include A Counting, The Green Book Project and The Scream Project. 'A Counting’ is a site-specific multimedia artwork that counts from 1 to 100; playing different crowdsourced multilingual voice samples for every number and displaying the word in the language. The Green Book Project is a series of courses, workshops, publications and interactive installations that reimagine the Negro Motorist Green Book for “traveling while Black” in this era of “New Jim Crows.” And the Scream Project is a series of publications and interactive installations that revive the Teotihuacan folklore/ritual of women practicing catharsis in the pyramids to contemporary urban spaces.

Applications are due December 1st. You can read more about our research group at https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/poetic-justice/. here and the graduate program at https://www.media.mit.edu/graduate-program/about-media-arts-sciences/.