Vicki Mayer, Ph.D., was a Professor of Communication at Tulane, where she researched media production and consumption in relation to economic and political transformations in the media and creative industries. Her students served as co-researchers of cultural labor and creative expression in a variety of community-based settings. Her goal as a Social Entrepreneurship professor was to continue developing ways to bring student and community voices into the public sphere through collaborative research, digital preservation, and open access.
To this end, she launched several digital humanities initiatives, most recently ViaNolaVie, a magazine of life and culture in New Orleans. Designed with students and community members over a two-year period, the site showcased student work on the community alongside content from freelance writers and artists. Once completed, the website provided public access to thousands of locally based stories generated over the past decade and continued to add more than one hundred stories by Tulane students each year. Her own research was made available through open access channels, including Jump Cut, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Public Culture. Her most recent book, on the lure of local film economies and the transformation of New Orleans, was made available as a free download via UC Press.
Mayer was a Carnegie Fellow and held the Louise and Leonard Riggio Professorship from 2014 to 2019.