Deirdre Boyle

Deirdre Boyle is a media historian, critic, curator, and educator whose scholarship has done more than almost any other single body of work to preserve and interpret the history of early video, guerrilla television, and the community media movements that shaped public access. Her book Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited is a foundational text for understanding the Videofreex, the Raindance Corporation, and the practitioners who used portable video in the late 1960s and early 1970s to imagine decentralized, community-controlled media before the regulatory framework that would eventually define public access existed.

Through her teaching and writing she has given the field an intellectual history to stand on, making the case not only that community media works in practice but that it has a coherent and significant past worth understanding.

Her work belongs in this archive because community media without its history is just a collection of local operations, and the history Deirdre has documented and interpreted gives those operations a lineage and a set of arguments they can use in their own defense.