ABSTRACT
This final chapter examines scholar-practitioners who“work both sides of the fence” in production studies. To address practical questions of methodology readers may have from the wide-ranging studies in this book, I hope to consider three individual scholars who pursue industry fieldwork at the same time they maintain production identities. This includes questions about: gaining access to closely guarded communities; the impact of professional identities on types of disclosure in the field; and the “trade-offs” scholar-practitioners make to pursue work on production. I am particularly interested in the extent to which fieldwork interactions enable or discourage researchers from maintaining independent critical arguments about their human subjects, and how “insider” technical knowledge might provide additional skills capable of cutting through the industry’s carefully maintained layers of promotional flak. All ethnography involves scholar-informant “exchanges,” but researching corporate, proprietary production worlds requires considerable negotiation if the scholar hopes to move beyond the tired forms of deference the trade and popular press typically grant industry. The intimate working knowledge of production processes of the three individuals featured in the following portfolio of interviews pushes them beyond the sometime rudimentary questions that scholars with little direct knowledge of film/television raise.Yet “straddling the fence” also forces them to regularly negotiate both their access and their critical distance from those granting access.
