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. 

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 University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In addition to helping Fembot Collective member Tom Oates write a history of women’s athletics for Wikipedia, Favara and Keegan will 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 seed money to grow into an international collective focused on feminist media studies and digital humanities. It is supported primarily by funding and assistance from the 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. His research interests focus on the ways gender, sexuality, race, class and other identity markers relate to media representations and production. 

His dissertation focuses on military recruitment advertisements to explore the symbolic production of the U.S. armed forces as an institution invested in diversity. Studying media representations, technologies and their circulation in structures of power, his research is committed to exploring the role of media in influencing lived experiences.

Tara Keegan is a master’s degree student and Peggy Pascoe Fellow in history. 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 examining the social position of prominent Native American distance runners in the early 20th century. An avid runner herself, Keegan was a four-year varsity letter winner and two-time captain of the women's track and field team at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.