The College of the Arts congratulates Tanya Zuk on being awarded the Provost’s Dissertation Fellowship. The fellowship supports doctoral students from across the university as they complete their dissertations and is awarded to candidates with outstanding scholarly accomplishments.
Zuk is completing her doctoral degree in the Moving Image Studies program in the School of Film, Media & Theatre. Her dissertation, “Queering Capitalism: Collaborative Authorship as Queer Sensibility,” theorizes that an emerging queer production culture is developing that prioritizes collaborative authorship with audience-participants in the creation of new media texts as a way of queering or othering capitalism.
Her work seeks to understand better the changing conceptions of authorship/ownership, canon/fanon (official text/fan created extensions), and community/capitalism in queer subculture as an indicator of the potential change in more mainstream cultural attitudes. This study aims to provide insight into how media creatives work with audiences to co-create self-representative media, as well as the motivations and rewards for creators, audiences and owners.
More information about her work can be found at https://qcapstudy.wordpress.com/.