Watch: Exploring Innovative Dissertation Formats
How can scholarship be articulated through dance or a musical album? Under the colorful lights of the DFI Gallery, members of the TC community explored five unconventional dissertations last spring as part of “MODES,” the immersive exhibit of multimodal scholarship presented by the Digital Futures Institute.
“There's a tendency to think multimodal equals digital or multimodal equals media — electronic or digital media. And all of these dissertations attended to multimodal as so much more: multifaceted, multi-material, multimedia,” explained Lalitha Vasudevan, Professor of Technology and Education, and the College’s Vice Dean for Digital Innovation. Vasudevan, also the Managing Director at the College’s Digital Futures Institute, hosted a panel discussion about the exhibit, now available to watch below.
“[The scholars] were pointing to and harnessing the affordances or the capacities of different tools, different spaces, different platforms, as you'll see, in trying to investigate really broad, but also substantive questions about various social phenomena.”
Watch the Panel Discussion
Meet the Scholars
Carousel
Brian Mooney (Ph.D. ’22, English Education)
Brian Mooney (Ph.D. ’22, English Education)
Dagmar Spain (Ed.D. ’24, Dance Education)
Dagmar Spain (Ed.D. ’24, Dance Education)
Ileana Jiménez (Ph.D. ’24, English Education)
Ileana Jiménez (Ph.D. ’24, English Education)
Kristin Gorski (Ed.D. ’15, Instructional Technology and Media)
Kristin Gorski (Ed.D. ’15, Instructional Technology and Media)
Lucius Von Joo (Ed.D. ’24, Communication and Education)
Lucius Von Joo (Ed.D. ’24, Communication and Education)
Published Wednesday, Sep 17, 2025
