Interviewing for Introverts: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get Out into the Field
In this workshop, Vicki Mayer, Ipek A. Celik-Rappas, and Helen Morgan Parmett will discuss how they have incorporated interviews, fieldwork, and other ethnographic practices into their research on media production. Drawing on research conducted across different fields, industries, and geographical contexts, the speakers will reflect on the value of working with industry professionals and share their strategies for navigating the potential challenges that arise through this kind of work. The session will consider how ethnographic methods can complement more traditional approaches to critical media studies and offer new ways of understanding the people, labor, and infrastructures behind media production.
Following the presentations, the speakers will participate in a Q&A and discussion with attendees about their research and methods.
Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication and of media studies at Tulane University. She is best known for her research on media production and consumption, specifically relating to economic and political transformations in creative industries. She has written about work in Mexican American creative industries, community media in Rio, data centers in the Netherlands, telephone and TV set companies in the Amazon, as well and US film and TV. Her most downloaded article is still about the production culture behind the performance of ‘flashing’ in New Orleans.
Ipek A. Celik-Rappas is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on media industries, production cultures, and the relationship between screen production and urban space. Her latest book, Filming in European Cities: The Labor and Policy Behind the Screen (Cornell University Press, 2025), draws on interviews with location scouts and managers, film commissioners, and other industry professionals across Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris.
Helen Morgan Parmett is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont (UVM). She also serves as the Director of the Speech and Debate Program and the university’s debate team, the Lawrence Debate Union, which has a 125+ year history of university debating. Helen’s research and teaching centers on critical media studies, which considers media’s implication in relations of cultural, social, political, and economic power. Her research specializes in the subfields of media geography and production studies, where she focuses on how media (especially television, new media, and sports media) practices constitute place and identity. Her first book explored how the on-location production practices of the HBO television series, Treme, participated in post-Katrina reconstruction of the city of New Orleans. Building on that research, her recently published monograph, Stadium City: Sports & Media Infrastructure in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2025), theorizes stadiums as urban media infrastructures that constitute new spatialities, senses of place, and identities in cities across the U.S. Her current research project turns to the urban’s constructed opposite—the rural—to consider how rural television and new media practices respond to and intervene into recent waves of rural gentrification.