Marian Meyers

Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1989

My primary research area is feminist media studies. I am particularly interested in the ways gender, race and class, along with other aspects of social identity, intersect within media representation.  I focus on news coverage because my background includes having been a reporter and editor in Massachusetts and New York. Most recently, I have been interested in the ways that neoliberalism has come to shape our social, political, economic and cultural environment, and the role that the media has played in advancing and maintaining a neoliberal agenda.

My research interests have been shaped, and continue to be shaped, by a feminist impulse for social action and to address inequities within the context of what I consider to have been missing, ignored or omitted within communication research. Thus, when I wrote my first book, News Coverage of Violence against Women: Engendering Blame, I was motivated by the fact that previous research on this topic had focused on individual, well-known instances but had left out the day-to-day news coverage that is most likely to shape our understanding of sexist violence. My motivation for writing African American Women in the News: Gender, Race and Class in Journalism, was that previous news studies of the portrayal of African Americans largely ignored women so that their findings mostly or exclusively applied to African American men only. And the impetus behind my most recent book, Neoliberalism and the Media, was to better understand – and explain to others – how the media has come to adopt and advance a neoliberal ideology that undermines democracy, community and the common good while advocating for free markets and deregulation.

As an academic and a feminist, I also have become interested in issues of equity within higher education as they affect women and people of the global majority. Women in Higher Education: The Fight for Equity takes an intersectional look at the ways academic policies, practices and structures work to perpetuate a hierarchy that maintains discrimination and a lack of equal opportunity and resources for women faculty and graduate students.v