Monica Russel y Rodriguez

Senior Lecturer Anthropology, Interim Director for Latina and Latino Studies (Ph.D. UCLA 1995)
1812 Hinman, Room 303
(847) 491-4831
mryr@northwestern.edu

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS: Cultural Anthropology; Latina/o Studies; Feminist theory; Ethnographic Praxis; Borderland Studies; Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies; Mixed-Race and Mexican Diaspora.

Monica Russel y Rodriguez is an ethnographer with broad disciplinary interests that include Anthropology, Latina/o Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Gender Studies. She works primarily with US Latina/o populations and larger questions of representation of Latinas/os in academe, public policy, and the media. Her interests are gender, sexuality, race and class in Latina/o communities. Her research areas include Los Angeles, Denver, rural New Mexico, and Chicago and the Chicago suburbs. Her research agenda and publications focus on Chicana feminist theory, theories and methods of ethnography, and questions of race and mixed race in Chicana/o communities. Her activism has centrally involved women's health and reproductive rights, particularly for under served and undocumented Latinas. Her articles have been published in Voces, a Journal of Chicana/ Latina Studies, The Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, The Latino Studies Journal, including reprints of her work in The Journal of Latino/a Research and Policy (2000) and The Qualitative Inquiry Reader (2001). She is currently working on policies of feminist editorial practices as an Associate Editor of The Chicana/ Latina Studies Journal. In addition to her participation in the Department of Anthropology, Russel y Rodriguez also collaborates with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program and the American Studies Program at Northwestern. She also works with undergraduate and graduate students in the Northwestern Latina/o Studies Research Initiative. She is also a Weinberg College Adviser. Russel y Rodriguez is currently working on two projects, Pura Mestiza: Gender, "Mixed Race," and Nation in Mexican America and 2) Chicana Feminism(s): a Practitioner's Guide. She is recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Danforth Foundation, she has recently mentored faculty for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and she has received research funding from several associations including the National Science Foundation and UCMexus.

RECENT COURSES TAUGHT

368 Latino Ethnography

330 Peoples of the World

390 Topics in Anthropology: Borderland Ethnography

101-6 Freshman Seminar: Representing the Border

RECENT PUBLICATIONS/PRESENTATIONS/CONFERENCES

2008 Accounting for MeXicana feminisms. American Ethnologist, Volume

35, Issue 2.

2008 Making Democracy Matter-Book Review Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano

Studies. Spring (vol.33, no.1): 241-245.

2007 Messy Spaces, Chicana testimonio, and the Un-Disciplining of

Ethnography. Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. 7(1) Fall.

2007 De-Coding Racialized Gender in the Immigrants’ Rights Marches

Organizer, Chair, and Presenter for the highlighted panel. Paper presentation: “Todos Somos Elvira: The Gendered Subtext of Immigration and Racialization” Latin American Studies Association. Montreal, Canada, September.

2006 “What to do with this Mess!” Organizer,

Chair, and presenter with Mariela Nuñez-Janes for the panel, “Chicana/Latina Feminism and Undisciplined Ethnography" American Anthropological Association. San Jose, CA. November,

2006 “The Bad Chicana Subject.” May 18, Ethnography Workshop, the

Sociology Department, Northwestern University.

2006 “Decolonizing Latin@ Ethnography” March 14, Latin American Studies

Association. San Juan, Puerto Rico.

2005 “Latinidad in Chidren's television programming: Dora the pan-Latina?”

National Assocation of Chicana and Chicano Studies. Miami, Fl. April 14-16,

2005 “A Practitioner’s Guide to Chicana/Mexicana Feminism.” Outline and

workshop. Presented to Chicago Latina Scholars Consortium. February 17, Chicago, IL.

2000 Russel y Rodríguez, Mónica “Mexicanas and Mongrels: Policies of

Hybridity, Gender and Nation in the US-Mexican War.” Latino Studies Journal 11(3).

2000 Invited presenter in “Race and the Politics of Mestizaje: Central

America, Mexico, and the Borderlands: A workshop for faculty and graduate students. Hosted by ILAS and CMAS at University of Texas, Austin. May 4-5,

1999 “Mixing It Up: Playing With and Fighting with Mixed Race Discourse.”

Organizer, chair, and presenter in the panel: Mixing It Up: Problematizing and Historicizing Mixed Race Discourse, Invited Session of the Association of Latina/o Anthropology and Association of Black Anthropology. American Anthropological Association. Chicago. November 20,

1999 “Mexican hybridity,” paper presented in the panel (Dis)ordering Chicanos

in Nation and Empire: Racing to and from whiteness. American Studies Association Annual meeting. Montreal, Quebec. October 31-Nov. 2,

1998 Russel y Rodríguez, Mónica. "Confronting the Silencing Praxis in

Anthropology: Speaking of/from a Chicana Consciousness." Qualitative Inquiry 4(1). Reprinted 2001 in The Qualitative Inquiry Reader Denzin and Lincoln (eds.), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

1997 Russel y Rodríguez, Mónica. "(En)Countering Domestic Violence,

Complicity, and Definitions of Chicana Womanhood." Voces: A Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies 2(1). Reprinted 2000 Journal of Latino/a Research and Policy. University of Colorado at Denver.

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