Miranda Banks
2018 - 2019 Visiting Artist and Scholar
Dr. Banks is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. Her primary area of research is the American film and television industries. Her work focuses on creative and craft guilds and unions, with a specific focus on power dynamics and creative production. She is author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and their Guild (Rutgers University Press, 2015), co-editor of Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (Routledge, 2009) and co-editor of Production Studies, The Sequel! Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries (Routledge, 2015).
Dr. Banks is a Principal Investigator at the Emerson Engagement Lab. Her work at the Lab has focused on engagement games around collaborative labor and tensions between individual gain and team building. Her current game is Room at the Top, a game that challenges ideas about bias in media production. Previously, she worked on The Boda-Boda Game, a partnership with the Red Cross in Uganda.
February 8th, 2019
Game Workshop - McMaster 329 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Room at The Top
Those in attendance will play this massively multiplayer card game designed for in-person engagement that challenges assumptions and biases about creative collaboration. In pursuit of success, how do we weigh our own vision with our team’s strategy? How do we seek out collaborators and what does that tell us about ourselves? Create, negotiate, and compete in a race to achieve success!
Lecture - McMaster 214 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Power and Privilege on the Road to Hollywood: Rerouting Pre-Industry Pipelines
Recent years have seen a rise in advocacy initiatives for women and people of color working in Hollywood. Film schools are more equitable than the media industries to which they serve as pipelines, but there are ways in which universities and training programs are reproducing the industries’ biases. In her talk, Miranda Banks will identify challenges and opportunities around issues of equity and access within the industries and pre-industries, arguing that media production programs are uniquely positioned to educate the next generation of media makers about creative collaboration across differences and challenge the status quo. She will discuss two interventions she has been involved in: as designer of Room at the Top, a massively multiplayer game that challenges assumptions about how we collaborate in creative environments, and as a co-founder of the initiative EDIT Media.