Vicki Mayer
Biographic Data
| ID | 141664 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vicki Mayer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vicki |
| FAMILY NAME | Mayer |
| SIGNATURE | MAYER V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tulane University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7812-3591 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 47 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Institutional Policy and Cultural Repertoires of Compliance During Covid-19 in Tel Aviv and New Orleans’ Cultural and Creative Industries
Cultural repertoires are tools for action, both preceding practices and shaping imaginings of their outcomes. This article introduces “cultural repertoires of compliance” as an analytic lens into the ways culture schematizes and scripts compliant actions. This approach is an alternative to others that attribute compliance to the effectiveness of a governance regime. Such explanations were common during the Covid-19 pandemic, when workers faced an…
Navigating Emotional Labor and Social Exchange in Hospitality: A Comparative Study of Food and Beverage Workers in Tel Aviv and New Orleans During Covid-19
This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on emotional management and social exchanges in the hospitality industry, focusing on food and beverage workers in Tel Aviv and New Orleans. Through 66 in-depth interviews conducted between 2021 and 2022, we explore how workers navigated altered social dynamics, heightened emotional labor, and moral dilemmas. Our analysis, grounded in Social Exchange Theory, dramaturgical theory, and the soc…
Emplacement and Emplotment: Media Production in Pandemic Times
Places matter, despite the discursive hype of virtual making or remote locations, in showing the ways that production is a process nested within social worlds. In 2020, global Hollywood promoted a “COVID-friendly ideal” in order to return to work during widespread lockdowns and work stoppages. Yet by focusing comparatively on the stories that film and television workers told about production during COVID, we argue that crisis stories reveal much …
When do we go from here? Data center infrastructure labor, jobs, and work in economic development time and temporalities
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, …
This site is a dead end? Employment uncertainties and labor in data centers
Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside…
Essential
A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered “essential workers” during the COVID-19 lockdown, I argue that all cultural workers might be considered essential at this time
De l’importance d’être ordinaire: Intermédiaires et talents à l’ère de la téléréalité
Si, aujourd’hui, les chaînes câblées payantes et autres plates-formes de vidéos à la demande proposent de plus en plus de séries au scénario très élaboré, interprétées par les plus grands noms d’Hollywood, à l’opposé du spectre de l’offre télévisuelle on trouve notamment les talk-shows et les programmes de téléréalité. Si les premiers rapprochent l’expérience télévisuelle de celle du cinéma, les seconds semblent l’en éloigner d’autant plus. En ef…
The MaafiA Mystique
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions
Small Data Theorizing
Small data theorizing encompasses the ways communities of collaborators deliberate over the status of data through a set of three mediational logics that pose alternatives to datafication. Small data theorizing is a way of generalizing a framework for understanding the role of the collaborators in digital archiving and database design processes, which often involve both communication researchers and ordinary institutions, such as universities and…
From peat to Google power: Communications infrastructures and structures of feeling in Groningen
This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back …
Media Policy and Governance
Given feminism's explicit remit over gender politics, it would be easy to point to every feminist media scholar of the past century as having an implicit standpoint toward media politics, whether it be around issues of representation, institutional dynamics, or uses and interactions. Yet a genealogy of feminist scholars who explicitly address media law and policy—the study of media and governance—well, that's a rarer breed. The governance guys te…
Os lugares onde os estudos de audiência e os estudos de produção se encontram
Os estudos de audiência e os estudos de produção possuem trajetórias de pesquisa bastante distintas, apesar de suas compartilhadas preferências pela teoria baseada na realidade empírica e metodologias de pesquisa. A partir de uma ampla etnografia de mídia das audiências e produtores, esse artigo mostra como os sujeitos humanos dos estudos de audiência e estudos de produção podem ser estudados em conjunto, para revelar as relações de poder envolvi…
Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy
Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy's uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses t…
The Places Where Audience Studies and Production Studies Meet
Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and…
Production Studies, The Sequel!: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries
This chapter examines the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB) discourses of self-regulation leading up to the implementation of the 1952 Television Code, which attempted to answer television's vocal critics by constructing a paradigm for wholesome content. The NAB's propaganda consistently projects an image of a stable and antagonistic relationship with the government, but this belies the complexities of their day-to…
Production Studies, the Sequel: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries
Brazilian Community Media: An Interview with Fernando Oliveira Paulino
Editor Vicki Mayer interviews University of Brasilia (UnB) professor Fernando Oliveira Paulino about his experiences with Brazilian community media initiatives at the university and in the Brazilian historical context
Creative work is still work
When HBO producer David Simon heard that he had won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2010, he quipped that his wife, a noted author herself, told him the morning after: ‘Hey Genius, you forgot to take t
Old Milestones and New Beginnings
This is a summary of milestones, both for the journal and editorial board members, as well as the start of a coeditorship for the journal. A look back at Daniel Schiller’s book Theorizing Communication supports the coeditors’ conception of a media studies that broadly understands communication as labor
Signs of Home
The film and media industries have turned New Orleans into “Hollywood South,” a transformation that regularly reorients residents’ relationships with their physical environment. In this essay, I describe the connections I see between the privatization of public space and the impacts of these respatializations on New Orleans as a place. The images in the essay provide a textured look at the way political economies can be visualized not only geogra…
What's in a Name
These words critique the ongoing tendency to create false dichotomies between different approaches in media studies. Delivered as part of a panel on the future of media studies at the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, I offer a definition of critique that all critical media scholars should share
Making Media Production Visible: An Introduction
This introduction looks at the history of media production research, seeks axes for the interdisciplinary theorizing of media production, and offers a discussion of the current conjuncture for research on media production. From there I outline the rationale for the volume, its organizing themes and sections.
Yeah You Rite: The Treme Issue
Reality Television’s ‘Classrooms’: Knowing, Showing and Telling about Social Class in Reality Casting and the College Classroom
Sociologist C. Wright Mills (1951) expressed the vagaries of defining class in the United States more than half a century ago with the paradox of who is middle class. On the one hand, most mid-century Americans defined themselves as ‘middle class’. On the other hand, the lack of a material basis for
Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy
Below the Line illuminates the hidden labor of people who not only produce things that the television industry needs, such as a bit of content or a policy sound bite, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion. Vicki Mayer considers the work of television set assemblers, soft-core cameramen, reality-program casters, and public-access and cable commissioners in relation to the globalized economy of the television industry. She…
Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy
Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy's uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses t…
From peat to Google power: Communications infrastructures and structures of feeling in Groningen
This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back …
The Places Where Audience Studies and Production Studies Meet
Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and…
Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography
Journal Article Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography Get access Vicki Mayer Vicki Mayer 1Vicki Mayer (PhD, 2000, University of California-San Diego) is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. 2Comments on this article may be addressed to Mayer at Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Communication Theory, Volume 15, Issue 2, 1 May 2005, Pages 148–167…
This site is a dead end? Employment uncertainties and labor in data centers
Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside…
The MaafiA Mystique
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions
Capturing cultural identity/creating community: A grassroots video project in San Antonio, Texas
The author investigates a grassroots video project in San Antonio, Texas, and the ways it has incorporated two residual cultural identities in the largely working-class Mexican American community, Chicano nationalism and Catholic humanism, to create an emergent culture based on communitarian values and creative expression. Using ethnographic field research, the author traces one video’s conceptualization, production and exhibition to illustrate t…
Navigating Emotional Labor and Social Exchange in Hospitality: A Comparative Study of Food and Beverage Workers in Tel Aviv and New Orleans During Covid-19
This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on emotional management and social exchanges in the hospitality industry, focusing on food and beverage workers in Tel Aviv and New Orleans. Through 66 in-depth interviews conducted between 2021 and 2022, we explore how workers navigated altered social dynamics, heightened emotional labor, and moral dilemmas. Our analysis, grounded in Social Exchange Theory, dramaturgical theory, and the soc…
When do we go from here? Data center infrastructure labor, jobs, and work in economic development time and temporalities
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, …
New Television and Media
As incoming editor, I have the fortunate opportunity to begin 2011 with a chance to define the journal, outline the contours of its scholarly influences, highlight the future trends, rally the troops, and so on. It’s been said before. That is, a decade ago, my predecessor and founder of the journal, Toby Miller, foreshadowed the death of television (or at least its transformation), the birth of televi-sion studies (or at least its recognition as …
Capturing cultural identity/creating community: A grassroots video project in San Antonio, Texas
The author investigates a grassroots video project in San Antonio, Texas, and the ways it has incorporated two residual cultural identities in the largely working-class Mexican American community, Chicano nationalism and Catholic humanism, to create an emergent culture based on communitarian values and creative expression. Using ethnographic field research, the author traces one video’s conceptualization, production and exhibition to illustrate t…
From Segmented to Fragmented: Latino Media in San Antonio, Texas
Historical evidence reveals that the definition of Latino mass media is a fragile but useful way to examine how cultural identity is forged through economic and industrial practices. Focusing on the development of Latino media and their political economy in San Antonio, Texas, the researcher describes four constructions of Latino producers and audiences: segmentation, massification, pan-ethnicity, and fragmentation. These constructions demonstrat…
When the Camera Won't Focus: Tensions in Media Ethnography
(2001). When the Camera Won't Focus: Tensions in Media Ethnography. Feminist Media Studies: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 307-322
Living Telenovelas/Telenovelizing Life: Mexican American Girls' Identities and Transnational Telenovelas
Living Telenovelas/Telenovelizing Life: Mexican American Girls' Identities and Transnational Telenovelas
Journal Article Living Telenovelas/Telenovelizing Life: Mexican American Girls' Identities and Transnational Telenovelas Get access Vicki Mayer Vicki Mayer 1Vicki Mayer (PhD, University of California, San Diego) is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 53, Issue 3, 1 September 2003, Pages 479–495, https://doi.org/10.111…
Please Pass the Pan: Retheorizing the Map of Panlatinidad in Communication Research
A departure from the tendencies in past research, which tended to focus solely on majority populations within the Latino community, this article posits new diasporas within the U.S. Latino community as a fertile area for communication research into issues of identity, representation, and citizenship. An examination of the wave of Argentinean migration since 2001 provides one example of how research on new diasporas would complicate the notions of…
Fractured Categories: New Writings on Latinos and Stereotypes – A Review Essay
Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography
Journal Article Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography Get access Vicki Mayer Vicki Mayer 1Vicki Mayer (PhD, 2000, University of California-San Diego) is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. 2Comments on this article may be addressed to Mayer at Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Communication Theory, Volume 15, Issue 2, 1 May 2005, Pages 148–167…
Digital television in Brazil: The view from Manaus | A televisão digital no Brasil: vista de Manaus
This article looks at the impacts that digital television technologies have had and likely will have in Manaus, Amazonas from the perspectives of people involved in manufacturing and development. Located both centrally in terms of global manufacturing and peripherally in terms of digital television policy, this article explores the anxieties, uncertainties, and ambivalences that the introduction of digital television has evoked with those charged…
Digital television in Brazil: The view from Manaus | A televisão digital no Brasil: vista de Manaus
Este artigo examina os impactos que a TV digital tem tido e continuará tendo em Manaus, no Amazonas, na perspectiva das pessoas envolvidas na manufatura e no desenvolvimento dos produtos. Localizando-se centralmente em termos da fabricação mundial e perifericamente em termos da política para televisão digital, este artigo explora as ansiedades, incertezas e ambivalências que a introdução da TV digital tem despertado naqueles que estão encarregado…
Letting It All Hang Out: Mardi Gras Performances Live and on Video
Mayer examines Mardi Gras as a commodified spectacle of female nudity in live performance, softcore video, and tourism. Mardi Gras brings together entrepreneurs and consumers in ways that reveal gender, race, and class relations not only in today's U.S. but also in America's consumption of its global Others
Guys Gone Wild?: Soft-Core Video Professionalism and New Realities in Television Production
This essay presents an ethnographic perspective on the performance of cameramen in the soft-core reality video industry. Much like the self-narratives among television producers, soft-core videographers frame their actions through masculinist discourses, which are then destabilized through the production process and labor conditions in the television economy.
My Media Studies, Fifty Years Later
Bringing the Social Back In: Studies of Production Cultures and SocialTheory
As a field of study, “production studies” captures for me the ways that power operates locally through media production to reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities at the level of daily interactions. Production studies, in other words, “ground” social theories by showing us how specific production sites, actors, or activities tell us larger lessons about workers, their practices, and the role of their labors in relation to politics, economic…
Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries
Introduction: Production Studies: Roots and Routes, Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. Part One: Histories of Media Production Studies. 1. Bringing the Social Back In: Studies of Production Cultures and Social Theory, Vicki Mayer. 2. Industry-Level Studies and the Contributions of Gitlin's Inside Prime Time, Amanda Lotz 3. Leo C. Rosten's Hollywood: Power, Status, and the Primacy of Economic and Social Networks in Cultural Pr…
Reality Television’s ‘Classrooms’: Knowing, Showing and Telling about Social Class in Reality Casting and the College Classroom
Sociologist C. Wright Mills (1951) expressed the vagaries of defining class in the United States more than half a century ago with the paradox of who is middle class. On the one hand, most mid-century Americans defined themselves as ‘middle class’. On the other hand, the lack of a material basis for
Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy
Below the Line illuminates the hidden labor of people who not only produce things that the television industry needs, such as a bit of content or a policy sound bite, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion. Vicki Mayer considers the work of television set assemblers, soft-core cameramen, reality-program casters, and public-access and cable commissioners in relation to the globalized economy of the television industry. She…
Alvarado Award 2011
New Television and Media
As incoming editor, I have the fortunate opportunity to begin 2011 with a chance to define the journal, outline the contours of its scholarly influences, highlight the future trends, rally the troops, and so on. It’s been said before. That is, a decade ago, my predecessor and founder of the journal, Toby Miller, foreshadowed the death of television (or at least its transformation), the birth of televi-sion studies (or at least its recognition as …
Making Media Production Visible: An Introduction
This introduction looks at the history of media production research, seeks axes for the interdisciplinary theorizing of media production, and offers a discussion of the current conjuncture for research on media production. From there I outline the rationale for the volume, its organizing themes and sections.
Yeah You Rite: The Treme Issue
What's in a Name
These words critique the ongoing tendency to create false dichotomies between different approaches in media studies. Delivered as part of a panel on the future of media studies at the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, I offer a definition of critique that all critical media scholars should share
Creative work is still work
When HBO producer David Simon heard that he had won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2010, he quipped that his wife, a noted author herself, told him the morning after: ‘Hey Genius, you forgot to take t
Old Milestones and New Beginnings
This is a summary of milestones, both for the journal and editorial board members, as well as the start of a coeditorship for the journal. A look back at Daniel Schiller’s book Theorizing Communication supports the coeditors’ conception of a media studies that broadly understands communication as labor
Signs of Home
The film and media industries have turned New Orleans into “Hollywood South,” a transformation that regularly reorients residents’ relationships with their physical environment. In this essay, I describe the connections I see between the privatization of public space and the impacts of these respatializations on New Orleans as a place. The images in the essay provide a textured look at the way political economies can be visualized not only geogra…
Sociology (32 works) · Media studies (21 works) · Political science (20 works) · Art (14 works) · Business (13 works) · Advertising (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Media Studies and Communication (11 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (10 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (10 works)