Rachel Reynolds, PhD
Department of Communication
Education:
- PhD, English and Linguistics, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2002
- MA, Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1997
- BA, Comparative Literature (Italian), University of Iowa, 1991
Research Interests:
- Sociolinguistics, Ethnography of Communication and Discourse Analysis
- Violence Against Women in Mass Media
- Political Economy of Migration – Brain Drain, Immigrants and Transnational Immigration
- Semiotics including the Textual, the Visual and the Multimodal
Bio:
I grew up in Chicago, which has long been an immigrant-receiving city, and one in which questions of race and ethnicity, inequality, geography, and access to power are always in the air. Over the course of my education, I came to approach the richness and challenges of American diversity through the study of language in interaction, the linguistic performance of group belonging, and intercultural dialog. In my early career, after fieldwork with African immigrants, I worked on developing new ideas about child and youth (im)migrants and human development. The topic of youth, human development and the future remain a central thread in my work.
Recently, I started to develop work on the portrayal of violence against women in television and other popular media, especially around changing the status quo around the treatment of women worldwide. I’ve been asking questions about how audience and producers influence each other around content on streaming-video-on demand and in turn, how various kinds of global access to streaming video coincide with social movements, social media marketing trends, and competing political stances around women’s rights.
Despite having two different research areas, I’m most engaged with trying to frame how the rich fabric and sophisticated discourses of American class, ethnic and gender difference can inform a progressive basis by which to approach the environmental and social challenges of the Anthropocene. Clearly, we need to change quickly, but out of what, and how?
Selected Publications:
Reynolds, Rachel and Paje, Dacia. Television Production, #metoo, and Gendered Challenges in Representing Rape. In Funnell, Lisa, and Beliveau, Ralph. (Eds.) Streaming #MeToo: Rape Culture in American Television. Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 2023.
Essentials of Visual Interpretation, Reynolds, Rachel R, and Niedt, Greg. Routledge Press. January 2021.
Musso, Maria Giovanna, Proietti, Michele, & R. R. Reynolds, Rachel R. 2020. Towards an integrated approach to violence against women: persistence, specificity and complexity. International Review of Sociology, DOI: 10.1080/03906701.2020.1820140
El-Burki, Imaani and Reynolds, Rachel R. It’s no secret that Justin wants to be black: Comedy Central’s Justin Bieber Roast and Neoliberal Race Representation. In Defining Identity and the Changing Scope of Culture in the Digital Age, Alison Novak and Imaani El-Burki, Editors, IGI-Global, 2016.
Reynolds, R. R. 2013. "Toward Understanding a Culture of Migration among Elite African Youth: Igbo College Students in the United States." In Kane, A. and Leedy, T. Migrations In and Out of Africa: Old Patterns and New Perspectives. Indiana University Press.