Position:
Interest and Bio:
Today more than ever, representations of psychological trauma and physical victimization saturate mass media coverage, profoundly shaping the contours of public debate about crime, terrorism, war and citizenship. Within these debates, the mass media are powerful sites of cultural and political identification. They are also strategic sites for cultural and political mobilization. Carrie Rentschler's research explores these issues by linking the mass circulation of media representations to their strategic mobilization by social movements, and corporate and political interests in the U.S. and Canada.
Professor Rentschler's publications examine the relationship between mass-mediated representations of suffering and models of citizenship, the gender politics of environmental security and its publicity, the diverse media activism practices of social movements, women's self-defense as a form of feminist pedagogy, and the gendered politics of fear. Her first book, Second Wounds: Victims Rights and the Media in the U.S. (Duke University Press, 2011), retells the recent history of crime and disaster media from the perspective of victims' rights reforms and publicity practices. She is currently writing a book on the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder (where 38 New Yorkers supposed looked on and did nothing) and its cultural legacies of failed witness.
Carrie Rentschler is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in Feminist Media Studies in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. She earned a B.A. magna cum laude in Humanities (1994) from the University of Minnesota, an A.M. in Speech Communication (1998) and a PhD in Communications (2002) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Projects:
Publications:
Professor Rentschler's publications examine the relationship between mass-mediated representations of suffering and models of U.S. citizenship, the gender politics of environmental security and its publicity, the diverse media activism practices of social movements, women's self-defense as a form of feminist pedagogy, and the gendered politics of fear. Her first book, Second Wounds: Victims' Rights and the Media in the U.S. is forthcoming from Duke University Press (March 2011). She is currently working on her second book, Witness Failed: Cultural Legacies of the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder.
Her recent publications include:
"An Urban Physiognomy of the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder" Space and Culture 14:3 (August 2011).
"The Physiognomic Turn," International Journal of Communication 4 (2010): 1-6.
"Trauma Training and the Reparative Work of Journalism." Cultural Studies 24:4 (2010).
"From Danger to Trauma: Affective Labor and the Journalistic Discourse of Witness." In Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, ed. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski. Palgrave Macmillan (2009), pp. 152-175.
"Sarah Palin, Sexual Anomalies and Historical Analogues." Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4:3 (November 2008)
"Risky Assignments: Sexing "Security" in Hostile Environment Reporting." Feminist Media Studies 7:3 (2007) 257-259.
"Victims' Rights and the Struggle over Crime and the Media." Canadian Journal of Communication, 31:2 (2007), 239-259.
She is the co-editor (with Carol Stabile) of a special issue of the NWSA Journal "States of Insecurity and the Gendered Politics of Fear."
A sample list of her other publications includes:
"Militarized Media at War and at Home" Communication Review 9:1 (Jan-March 2006), 143-154.
"Witnessing: U.S. Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience of Suffering" Media, Culture & Society 26:2 (March 2004), 296-304.
"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), 243-272.
"Women's Self-Defense: Physical Education for Everyday Life" Women's Studies Quarterly 26:1 (1999), 152-161.
Faculty page:
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