Michelle Rodino-Colocino
Professional Bio
An award-winning scholar, Dr. Michelle Rodino-Colocino (she/her/hers; they/them/their) works as Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications where they taught for 14 years and have worked with many wonderful colleagues and friends. I am also affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Rock Ethics Institute in the College of Liberal Arts. By the numbers: I have published over 50 scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and essays in leading communications journals and outlets for public scholarship (including 25 peer-reviewed journal articles); I have one forthcoming edited volume and a monorgraph in progress. I have taught 16 graduate and undergraduate courses and taught and mentored thousands of students. I taught for three years as assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati before coming to Penn State, and I thank my colleagues there for creating such a supportive environment.
Related Materials
This edited collection examines the gig economy in the age of convergence from a critical political economic perspective. Contributions explore how media, technology, and labor are converging to create new modes of production, as well as new modes of resistance.
From rideshare drivers in Los Angeles to domestic workers in Delhi, from sex work to podcasting, this book draws together research that examines the gig economy's exploitation of workers and their resistance. Employing critical theoretical perspectives and methodologies in a variety of national contexts, contributors consider the roles that media, policy, culture, and history, as well as gender, race, and ethnicity play in forging working conditions in the 'gig economy'. Contributors examine the complex and historical relationships between media and gig work integral to capitalism with the aim of exposing and, ultimately, ending exploitation.
This book will appeal to students and scholars examining questions of technology, media, and labor across media and communication studies, information studies, and labor studies as well as activists, journalists, and policymakers.
We want to end sexual harassment and assault at Penn State. Following Tarana Burke’s intersectional Me Too movement to build empowerment for survivors through empathy, how can we create solidarity and collective action via empathy across our various communities of students and employees and in the wider communities of State College and Centre County, PA (Adetiba, 2017; Garber, 2018; “Meet Tarana Burke,” 2017; Rodino-Colocino, 2018)? How can we move women, men, and nonbinary students, faculty, and staff at Penn State and members of our town and county, across socioeconomic divides, ethnic backgrounds, national origins, racial identities, and sexual orientations to stand together to end sexual harassment and assault?
Our personal experiences as survivors, advocates, and healers at Penn State and at other institutions of higher learning make us painfully aware of the devastation that sexual harassment and assault causes and that research documents.
Critical and cultural studies scholars have long debated the promise and perils of pressing empathy, the sensation of shared feelings and experiences, into toppling systems of oppression and its attendant cruelty.1 The aim of this essay is not to discuss the contours of these debates in the abstract. Instead, I consider how Tarana Burke's “Me Too” movement, which seeks “empowerment through empathy,” counters the cruelty of sexual harassment and assault, both of which Donald Trump has been accused of committing. The cruelty with which Trump forges policy and references women constitutes “public cruelty” that Judith Shklar theorizes as “the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible.”2 Public cruelty, furthermore, is “made possible by differences in public power, and it is almost always built into the system of coercion upon which all governments have to rely to fulfill their essential functions.”3 The following essay considers how Burke's Me Too and its contributions to liberation via #MeToo and Times Up challenge the very systems of power that underlie harassment, discrimination, and assault by promoting empathy from the ground up (among individuals and in our political-economic system).
This essay underscores Kevin M. Carragee and Lawrence R. Frey’s call for communication researchers to engage in more interventions to advance social justice. Furthermore, I argue that communication activism research (CAR) and critical-cultural communication research (CCCR) make productive partners because both approaches oppose oppression. Several recent critical-cultural CAR and CAR-enabling research projects illustrate such productive potential, suggest ways to overcome obstacles, and explain how to realize social justice within and beyond the academy. Finally, I call for academic solidarity as a force that will enable social justice to be achieved, as CCCR and CAR intend.
This essay explores women and mobile intimacy through the story of “Neighborhoodworks.net” —a community-cooperative, never-launched Wi-Fi zone in Walnut Hills, Cincinnati—that intended to serve poor, unemployed, ambiguously raced single mothers whom project advocates called “Vanessa.” “Vanessa” is significant as a “post-welfare” figure of feminine poverty who individualizes what, at other moments in history, has been understood as a political problem that demanded remedy via collective action. I conclude by calling on feminist scholars to move beyond taken-for-granted notions about the rewards of mobile privatization, and instead, embrace political struggle.
Precarious labor has become an organizing issue for labor movements and a fruitful object of study for critical communication scholars. The work of communication scholars' challenging precarious labor's exploitation, however, has not been adequately explored, perhaps because communication scholars are not engaging in labor activism, but also perhaps because communication research for social justice has not yet been widely embraced. This essay offers remedies for both problems by exploring what I call “participant activism” through analysis of the epistemological and political lessons learned from working as a scholar and activist with Washtech (the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers), a high-tech labor union for precarious workers.
This essay explores how national, ethnic, racial, and gendered identities substituted for class-based ones and illustrates why this metonymy mobilized information technology (IT) workers in 2002–2005. I examine narratives about job loss and insecurity on websites founded by laid-off and otherwise “precarious” white male IT professionals. I argue these narratives form “geek jeremiads” that “speak the crisis” of job loss in ways that negotiate “wages” of white masculinity and preclude robust class struggle during our present gilded age. By blaming offshored and H-1B visa labor, geek jeremiads contribute to a longstanding “herrenvolk-republican” class consciousness. But they also point toward a more inclusive one. I conclude by considering how critical-cultural communication scholars may advance a more inclusive class consciousness.
The purpose of this paper is to examine ‘technomadic’, or ‘technomediated’ mobile work at the levels of labour process and labour market. It investigates the promise of technomadic work at the level of the labour process, analyses the exploitation of technomadic work at the level of the labour market, and presents an instructive case study of the ways in which US workers are collectively struggling against such arrangements through the high-tech workers’ union WashTech, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. The following analysis remedies gaps in the literature on technology and work by examining two overlooked phenomena: firstly the way in which the production of mobile labour markets contradicts the liberatory promise of technomadic labour processes; and secondly, workers’ collective action against exploitation in the mobile, global labour market. By combining methods that interpret meanings within texts about labour processes with an empirical overview of trends regarding the labour market, this essay aims to contribute to the productive conversation between research in political economy and in cultural studies and to an understanding of divergence between the representations and experiences of technomadic work.
This article confronts the virtual university movement by analyzing its promotion in Washington state, particularly during 1998. I critically evaluate key speeches and policy proposals made by Locke and his advisors and analyze planning and promotional documents of the Western Governors University and the 2020 Commission. I also consult PricewaterhouseCooper’s Reinventing the University (1998). Analysis of these texts shows that the virtual university serves as a discursive toolbox that helps rationalize and obfuscate strategies to reorganize higher education. In so doing, the e-cademy distracts us from the less dramatic, less visible ways in which policymakers and administrators intend to finance higher education and deskill and downsize its labor force.
Words and knowledge of history are necessary but are not enough; collective action, coalition-building, and solidarity must be part of our activism. Labor activists view the raid as retaliation for workers’ multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit settlement with Koch Industries, whose chicken processing plants were targeted. Creating learning environments in which students discuss their grief following gun massacres allows them to find ways to make the world-a world that is both of and “off” campus-safer and more equitable and humane. This work is activist in the deepest sense of the word because it is world-changing for the people it affects. Activism and Rhetoric details some of the ways that readers may take action as scholars to end oppression and promote social justice on and around our workplaces. Researching and teaching rhetoric afford opportunities to effect social justice. With privilege comes responsibility to create social justice.