About Caitlin

PERSONAL BACKGROUND & EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE

I grew up learning the importance of survival from a young age. Raised in a predominantly white, working class small town in Michigan, I have been a survivor of teen dating violence, stalking, rape, brainwashing, and ongoing sexual abuse that began at the age of twelve. Fleeing a place where an erected statue of Native American massacrist George Custer stands tall even today, I retroactively learned firsthand how the norms of hegemonic masculinity, the cult of domesticity, and the maintenance of white supremacy have historically functioned as compounded ideological sources of perpetual power-based harm. Like many survivors of sexual violence, my pursuit of higher education became a way out and a stepping stone toward thinking and existing beyond the privileges and confines of whiteness. Alongside years of personal trauma work, my academic and professional career has heightened my level of empathy for victims and survivors of sexual violence, and it has sharpened my awareness of long standing social inequalities. This awareness led me to pursuing an education and career in anti-violence advocacy whose tenets of practice-based work attracted me.

My undergraduate and subsequent professional career led me to pursue a masters degree in public diplomacy, through which I focused on international human rights nonprofit advocacy and strengthened my passion for addressing power-based harm through a transnational feminist lens. I began my doctoral studies in August 2017 as a critical cultural studies scholar and sexual violence researcher, just months prior to the virality of the #MeToo movement in October 2017. Embedding myself within anti-sexual violence campus resources like the USC Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP) department as a student volunteer, local community-based organization Peace Over Violence as an ethnographer focused on participatory action research, and national organization Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) as a volunteer online hotline specialist, I gained exposure to both intervention and prevention work largely informing my own intersectional, transnational feminist, and transformative justice approaches to researching the distinct form of sexual violence known intellectually as multiple perpetrator rape. 

Situated in intersectionality studies, critical cultural studies, and transnational feminism, my current research is influenced by my previous career in human rights, genocide research and prevention education, but it is also deeply grounded in critical theories of power, violence, and trauma, and the subject advanced most pointedly in intersectionality studies. For example, my dissertation project, “Multiple Perpetrator Rape Culture: A Critical Intersectional Study of Media & Sexual Violence,” aims to create new knowledge about carceral feminism and the transformative possibilities of abolitionist feminist responses to sexual violence. Works in progress include a solo-authored article on media narratives depicting the multiple perpetrator rape of Recy Taylor and her white perpetrators, for submission to the journal Feminist Media Studies, as well as a book chapter focused on the pink pussyhat and white feminist praxis in the context of anti-sexual violence activism, as contribution to Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics, and Resistance (forthcoming).

Between 2019 and 2023, I was assistant editor of the International Journal of Communication, a top-ranking, open-access, multimedia, and online academic journal publishing Communication and interdisciplinary research on a global scale. During my tenure at IJoC, I helped publish work generated by scholars dedicated to critical Communication scholarship, including the intersections of violence and trauma studies and digital media studies. I am co-convener of the Multidisciplinary Intersectional Approaches to the Study of Violence and Trauma research group, a collective of scholars spanning 4-5 disciplines and multiple academic institutions, within which we build community, foster sustainable systems of support throughout each member’s academic journey, and facilitate opportunities for cross-disciplinary research collaboration. Through my non-linear yet interconnected work within this research group, the USC Center for Feminist Research, and the USC Gender & Sexuality Studies department, I offer years of experience in conceptualizing, facilitating, and moderating multiple public-facing events, programs, and workshops that have brought together campus and local community members committed to anti-violence work.

The ethical commitments of my intersectional sexual violence research extend to the classroom environment, within which I strive to remain human-centered and trauma-informed, meet students where they are, and help carry forward their shared passion for social justice. My primary goal as an educator aware of institutional power dynamics is to decenter myself as the educator and co-create brave spaces with students each semester. In creating a mutual learning environment, students feel safe and brave enough to hold difficult conversations and challenge one another. I excel in mentoring students who are passionate about a particular social issue(s), informed by their own lived experience in relation to it, and driven by a sincere interest in humanities-based approaches to creating systemic, structural, and cultural change.

For several years during my graduate studies I taught a diverse population of students in both lower and upper-division courses for both the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC Dornsife Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies. More recently, I revised and co-instructed a longstanding course entitled “Gender, Media, and Communication,” which deployed Black feminist, Women of Color feminist, Indigenous feminist, and decolonial feminist writings as foundational to applying a critical intersectional lens to constructions of gender largely informed by media representations and communication practices. In Spring 2023, I taught Introduction to Feminist Studies as a Visiting Instructor within the Critical Theory and Social Justice Department of Occidental College before joining the department full time as a Visiting Instructor during the 2023-2024 academic year.

In a related way, my years of involvement with anti-sexual violence work in the face of multiple layers of power-based harm at the University of Southern California have taught me both the difficulty and importance of coalition building across departments and institutions, in order to prevent future harm. Collaborating with students, faculty, staff, and community-based organizations to raise awareness of rape culture in the context of campus sexual violence, I have learned in real time the urgency of coalition building as a solution and imperative for longterm cultural change. I hope to carry forward my years of experience in social justice activism, my critical mutual learning approaches to pedagogy, and my intersectional approaches to sexual violence research as a college or university gender and sexuality studies faculty member over the course of the next year, and for years to come.