Behind the Camera: Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Media and Culture
Session Type(s): Panel
Training Tag(s): Women, Media / Journalism / Blogging, Arts & Culture
Starts: Saturday, Jun. 9 1:30 PM (Eastern)
Ends: Saturday, Jun. 9 2:45 PM (Eastern)
Women are dramatically underrepresented in almost every level of media and popular culture, whether they’re writing, directing, producing or greenlighting projects. While most media criticism tends to focus on the representations of women, whether in romantic comedies or on comic book covers, it’s time to pay attention to who is—and isn’t—making decisions about how culture gets made in the first place. We’ll break down the numbers on women—in particular, women of color—in media; talk about the importance of the pop culture chain of command; and discuss the best ways for consumers to put pressure on companies to produce more genuinely progressive stories, characters and explorations of women’s issues in mass culture.
Moderator
Alyssa Rosenberg
Alyssa Rosenberg is a culture reporter for ThinkProgress.org. She is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. Alyssa grew up in Massachusetts and holds a B.A. in humanities from Yale University. Before joining ThinkProgress, she was editor of Washingtonian.com and a staff correspondent at Government Executive. Her work has appeared in Esquire.com, The Daily, The American Prospect, The New Republic, National Journal, and The Daily Beast.
Panelists
Anna Holmes
Founder: Jezebel.com. Writer and editor (Newsweek, The NY Times, Salon.com, Glamour, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated.) Former contributing columnist, Washington Post. Author: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair. (Ballantine, 2002.)
Other sessions: Funny Feminism: Joking Our Way to Gender Equality
Elana Levin
Elana has lead trainings in digital strategy for nonprofits, unions and community organizations since 2006. Elana is Program Director at New Media Mentors, a project of Netroots Nation, leading digital strategy trainings online and off as well as trainings on integrating popular culture into campaigns.
She joins Netroots Nation’s staff after serving as digital director for labor unions and community based organizations and has lead trainings for over 4,000 progressives as co-founder of Organizing 2.0.
She has also worked at the intersection of popular culture and online organizing for over a decade connecting nonprofits with pop culture creators and fans and applying the lessons of storytelling to the fight for social and economic justice.
She hosts Graphic Policy Radio podcasts (“Where comics and politics meet”). Elana tweets about the labor movement, online organizing and superhero comics at @Elana_Brooklyn.
Alli Thresher
Alli Thresher is a jill of all trades from Boston, Massachusetts. She’s currently a member of the design team at Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. When she’s not working on Dance Central, she’s playing other video games or writing about the game industry, nerdery, fandom and feminism, or related topics. She’s been a guest panelist at a number of conferences, and has been published on xojane.com, thinkprogress.org, nerdappropriate.com, and other outlets.