Vicki Mayer

I am driven to understand how and why people work with media and through media and communications industries. This research agenda ranges from questioning the micro-dynamics of media production—who are media producers, how do culture, identity, and community influence their work—to the political economies of communications industries and infrastructures support or deter media production. All of this research has been place-based, generally using ethnographic or human-subjects’ insights in addition to other archival, quantitative, or textual analyses. While I do not consider myself a Brazilianist or a regional specialist, I find that case studies in Latin America or Latino America provide important counter-examples to the normative assumptions found in dominant communication and media discourses and theories.

I began doing fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the 1990s with grassroots video producers working to achieve social goals through media production. From there, I became a participant in Mexican-American community media in San Antonio, Texas, using many of the techniques and methods used in Brazilian communities. My action research agenda was to continually improve the community media project while, at the same time, I was studying Mexican Americans as media producers and consumers. That work became a dissertation on how different generations of Mexican Americans used media to express differing notions of cultural citizenship.

That work also led to a research subdiscipline in media studies known as ‘production studies.’ That subdiscipline focuses on the cultural aspects of different job roles and work in media industries, how the structures of work produces the normative labor force in terms of race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, and class. My first and second books theorize identity and media labor grounded in my fieldwork in San Antonio, Texas; Davis, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Manaus, Amazonia.

In the newest chapter of this trajectory to understand media production and communications industries, I have working on new field projects to illuminate the ways that the largest media and communications industries in the world use public monies to control and manage labor and production cultures. Although this work has not advanced in Latin America yet, I hope to do fieldwork there again soon.