The Program in Media Studies also oversees the Critical Media Lab, which serves as the research arm of the program. Each year, the Media Studies Steering Committee solicits and reviews applications from faculty to lead an applied research project of their design, to be conducted over the course of an academic semester with students enrolled in MDIA 401: Critical Media Lab, with support from a pre-doctoral graduate student fellow. The course operates, as the name suggests, as a lab: the students, predoctoral fellow, and professor work together to research a media problem and to produce and disseminate new scholarship, whether in the form of articles, podcasts, or video.
Depending on student demand, the lab typically runs two projects each year, one per academic semester. Topics include the empirical study of how representations of climate change affect audience perceptions and how media genres adapt to new constellations of activist discourse.