November 10, 2015—The Fembot Collective has selected two University of Oregon graduate students as graduate interns to help work on Fembot projects, with special project funding awarded by the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS). Jeremiah Favara and Tara Keegan will travel to Los Angeles in March for the event “Ms. Fembot 2016: A Digital Initiative for Civic Engagement,” to be held at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In addition to helping Fembot Collective member Tom Oates work on writing the history of women’s athletics into Wikipedia, Favara and Keegan be working to support Books Aren’t Dead and other projects.
Fembot began as the CSWS Gender, New Media, and Technology Research Interest Group more than five years ago, and leveraged that seed money to grow into an international collective focused on feminist media studies and digital humanities, supported primarily by funding and assistance from CSWS, the UO Libraries Digital Scholarship Center, and the UO School of Journalism and Communication.
Jeremiah Favara is a graduate teaching fellow in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. His research interests focus on the ways gender, sexuality, race, class, and other identity markers relate to media representations and production. Specifically, his dissertation focuses on military recruitment advertisements to explore the symbolic production of the U.S. armed forces as an institution invested in diversity. Through an analysis of military advertisements that articulate and reflect contested ideals of citizenship emerging through representations of gender, sexuality, race, and class, his dissertation asks how difference has been used in recruiting appeals targeted towards women and people of color. Studying media representations, technologies, and their circulation in intersectional structures of power, his research is committed to exploring the role of media in influencing lived experiences.
Tara Keegan is currently a masters student and Peggy Pascoe Fellow in history at the University of Oregon. She is also a co-president of the Graduate Student History Guild. Her research interests include race relations, colonialism, and Native American history. In her own work, she is currently examining the social position of prominent Native American distance runners in the early twentieth century. An avid runner herself, Tarawas a four-year varsity letter winner and two-time captain of the Women’s Track & Field team at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania and enthusiastically participates in the Eugene running scene.
