FANDOM FEATURE
A Conversation with Tracy Van Slyke from the Pop Culture Collab by Madeleine Buckley, associate editor
M
any artists, entertainment industry influencers, and people in social movements have been working on projects focused on the intersection of pop culture and social change for decades. However, according to Tracy Van Slyke, chief strategy officer at the Pop Culture Collaboration, those projects have traditionally been under-resourced and segmented. This lack of cohesion inspired philanthropic organizations the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Unbound Philanthropy, the Ford Foundation, and more to band together, forming and funding what would become the Pop Culture Collaboration, which was founded in 2016 and launched publicly in 2017. As an organization, the Pop Culture Collaboration (often shortened to Pop Culture Collab) works to transform the narrative environment for and with people of color, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, and indigenous communities, with a particular focus on women, transgender, and disabled people. We chatted with Van Slyke about the organization’s goals, the impact of last summer’s social justice movements on pop culture, and more. The Pop Insider: For people who may not be familiar, can you give us an overview of what the Pop Culture Collab does, and how it works toward its stated goals?
Tracy Van Slyke: We [work toward our goals] in a couple different ways. We do a lot of grant-making to those who are working in the pop culture for social change fields, social justice organizations that are starting or building long-term culture-change campaigns, artists who are sort of reimagining and reinventing new kinds of infrastructure inside the entertainment industry itself, entertainment companies that are moving and distributing really powerful stories, and a lot of different kinds of cultural strategists and researchers. So we do a lot of grant-making in that space. We also do a lot of partnership and relationship development between social movements, the entertainment industry, and the philanthropic community. And we also do a lot of learning. Helping people understand what’s happening, what’s changing, and what are powerful trends. For example, we have spent a lot of time investing in the world of pop culture fandoms because we believe they’re incredibly powerful to not only how fandoms are changing pop culture storytelling — influencing the industry itself — but they are also actually models for communities that are being built online for social movements, both in very powerful ways, in wonderful ways, and sometimes in mildly toxic ways. So we have been doing a lot of investing through research and through our senior fellow of pop culture and fandom power, Shawn Taylor, who
wrote a manifesto called “We the Fans.” We kind of do a lot of learning and then sharing those learnings back into the people we’re working with and helping them activate those insights through the work they’re doing. PI: Can you give us additional examples of some of the work that the grant recipients are doing, especially in terms of fandoms? TVS: Dr. Maytha Alhassen did a whole research project on stereotypical tropes around Muslims in Hollywood for the last 100 years, and she created this whole report around that. It is now being actively used by a lot of story creators, producers, and writers inside the industry. We have a senior fellow, Zahra Noorbakhsh, who was working on what is broken in the pipelines for rising comedians — especially comedians of color, historically marginalized comedians — and what are innovative new pipelines and infrastructure that can lead to ascension and sustainability of all these fabulous comedians who are often pushed out of the traditional pipelines. And, coupled with that, we have made grants to a new initiative called the Yes And Laughter Lab, which is a new kind of pipeline for comedians, mostly BIPOC comedians, who are telling stories that matter and partnering and pitching them with all sorts of entertainment industry partners and distributors. So we can
74 | Issue No. 10 | THE POP INSIDER
Pop CultureCollab_NewTemplate.indd 74
7/1/21 1:21 PM
