Interview: Fembot Collective | Vicki Mayer
One of the organizations that I’ve spent some quality volunteer time with over the last couple of years has been the Fembot Collective, originally based out of Oregon, and soon to be on the move to a new home. I was happily one of the founding members, along with 25 or so other amazing women, mostly scholars and/or activists – pretty much all of them movers & shakers.
This is an organization that is finding ways to question, discuss and publish scholarly and everyday commentaries, questions, observations and experiences in internet and web-based ways, from a feminist perspective.
In the spring of 2013, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Vicki Mayer, a Professor at Tulane University, for the Fembot Collective’s Books Aren’t Dead series. We discussed her recent publication: Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, and the way she developed her own academic voice and research agenda. It’s a book that I’ve used in the graduate Media, Culture and Society class I teach at Mount Saint Vincent University, particularly to discuss the role of creativity, precarity, and the authority of practice and experience in the media business. It’s also a book that I’ve found useful for my own research. Vicki was generous with her time and thoughts, and we had a great conversation.