Associate Professor,
William Dawson Scholar Chair in Feminist Media Studies
B.A. (Minn.), M.A., Ph.D. (Ill.-Urbana-Champaign)
Carrie Rentschler joined the McGill faculty in 2004 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies. Her academic interests include feminist media studies, feminist theory and methods, cultural studies of journalism, affect theory, and the critical study of crime and violence. She has published articles and book chapters on the relationship between mass mediated representations of suffering and models of U.S. citizenship, the affective labour of reporters, the gender politics of environmental security, media activism in social movements, women's self-defense as feminist pedagogy, victims' rights, the changing professional cultures of journalism, and Sarah Palin. She has a forthcoming book, Second Wounds: Victims' Rights and the Media in the US, and is currently researching the cultural history of Kitty Genovese's 1964 murder in New York City for her next book project. Her in-program and completed graduate supervisees write on the place-based activist techne of Greenham Common women before the world wide web, the feminist figure of the amateur female sleuth in current television programming and popular book series, the cultural memory of Canadian feminism, the pedagogical imaginary and practice of digital storytelling and its activist potentials, the nostalgic film of 1960s Quebec and its gendered generational ideologies, the discourse of failure and practices of remembering the history of Winnipeg's community television, the subjectivity of animals in philosophical treatments of environmentalism, the political path-making of queer Arab women of colour anti-war activists in Montreal, the geographic imaginary of security on the U.S./Canada border, the media practices and political imagination of U.S. right-wing activists, and the discourse and representation of sex worker labor on websites such as Suicide Girls as issues of women's self-esteem and empowerment.
Selected Publications
"Trauma Training and Reparative Work in Journalism" (forthcoming) in Cultural Studies.
"Sarah Palin, Sexual Anomalies and Historical Analogues." Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4:3 (November 2008). Available online at: http://liminalities.net/4-3/palin.html.
"From Danger to Trauma: Affective Labor and the Journalistic Discourse of Witness." Accepted for publication in Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, ed. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
"Risky Assignments: Sexing "Security" in Hostile Environment Reporting." Feminist Media Studies 7:3 (2007), 257-279.
"Victims' Rights and the Struggle over Crime in the Media." Canadian Journal of Communication, 32:2 (2007), 239-259.
"States of Insecurity and the Gendered Politics of Fear." Co-editor of a special issue of the NWSA Journal 17:3 (Fall 2005).
"Militarized Media at War and at Home." The Communication Review 9:1 (January-March 2006), 143-154.
"Witnessing: U.S. Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience of Suffering" Media, Culture & Society 26:2 (March 2004), 296-304.
"Securing Profits." In Collective Action: A Bad Subjects Anthology, ed. Joel Schalit and Megan Shaw Prelinger. London: Pluto Press (2004), pp. 198-205.
"Designing Fear: How Environmental Security Protects Property at the Expense of People." In Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality, Eds. Jack Bratich, Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy. Albany: SUNY Press (2003), pp. 243-272.
"Expanding the Definition of Media Activism." In Blackwell Companion to Media Studies, ed. Angharad Valdivia. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers (2003), pp. 529-547.
"Women's Self-Defense: Physical Education for Everyday Life" Women's Studies Quarterly 26:1 (Spring 1999), 152-161.
"United We Stand: Fresh Hoagies Daily" with Carol Stabile and Jonathan Sterne, Bad Subjects #59 (February 2002), 8 manuscript pages. Online at http://www.eserver.org/bs/59/rentschler.html.
"Perpetrate My Fist: Women's Self-Defense as Physical Education for Everyday Life," Bad Subjects #22 (October 1995), 6 manuscript pages. Online at http://www.eserver.org/bs/22/rentschler.html.