ABSTRACT
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, economics, and culture. It is this connection, between the micro contexts and the macro forces, which illuminates the social implications in an otherwise narrow case study and modifies the grand claims that have become commonplace regarding the role of media in society. It is also this connection between macro and micro that is so frequently lost in the efforts to describe the current media landscape, its interconnected industries, and its networks of professionals. It is ironic that as media industries continue to aggregate and dominate larger labor markets and audience shares, fewer production studies have actually addressed the real ways that local communities construct their subjectivities in the face of these consolidations of media capital and reconfigurations of media work.
