Aimee Rickman
PhD
Hi.
I am an ethnographer, critical researcher of U.S. youth and social technologies, founding director of the Youth & Social Media Research Lab, and associate professor of Communication at California State University, Fresno.
My first book, Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration: US Teens' Use of Social Media to Negotiate Offline Struggles, is now out in paperback.
Using critical and sociocultural theory, my research considers U.S. youth, social media, algorithms, identities, and marginality as social technologies, and it examines the meaning-making processes through which technologies are culturally codified.
I consider young people's involvements in the U.S. on- and offline, examining infrastructures organizing and shaping understandings, and situating this work within wider historical, economic, social, cultural, legal, and material contexts.
I teach courses on theory, cultural studies, media communication, youth, gender, social influence, persuasion, research methods, and praxis. Outside of the classroom, my Youth & Social Media Research Lab involves students in research.
As a scholar, I have coined two terms to conceptualize and operationalize powerful social technologies impacting youth and U.S. culture within our current historical moment: media migration and panopticonning.
Recent News:
February 2024:
Feb. 14
New essay in the Independent Media Center's Public i on US culture, power, and fascism's collective communicative effort to defame and destroy your pro-democratic neighbors (note: you have been enlisted in the witch hunt).
November 2023:
45 and others leading witch hunts have always played the victim, using institutional DARVO (denial, attacking, reversal of victim and offender) to stigmatize, criminalize, and punish those challenging privatization and other forms of authoritarian enclosure.
I wrote about a real-life witch hunt going on in the US. Featuring CU hero Mary Lee Sargent, this piece looks at the inequity, censorship, and struggle that have always been part of this country's normalized white nationalism.
(Fellow rebel girl luminaries Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Silvia Federici, Hannah Arendt, & Jolie Rickman accompany Mary Lee.)
Despite denial, US capitalism's violent profiteering advances structurally, and through fanned vigilantism. My piece argues that we need to look both back and around us right now to understand today's rising fascism, and to stand with those challenging its anti-democratic roots which conspire to choke us into silence (and worse).
Herstory matters. Right-seekers matter. Right-seeking matters. Rights matter. Communication matters.
Older News:
I wrote an article, and Monthly Review picked it up.
It traces the history of Pride Month in the US, linking past to present. It also discusses how a Midwestern org supporting LGBTQ+ folx is being targeted with defamation from social media-obscured right-wing forces.
People may be encouraged to think the attack on LGBTQ+ people is bounded to certain rogue states in the US.
Not so, I argue.
April 2022:
Art exhibit
Three of my pieces from the WATR series will be available for public viewing April 2-16 in Champaign, Illinois.
January 2022:
WATR art project out
Snippet of page 1
Snippet of page 10
Snippet of page 7
We Are the Resource (WATR) completed.
WATR, a collaborative art project by Aimee Rickman, Shaheen Shorish, and Sophie Hall, has been released.
WATR is sponsored in part by a City of Urbana Arts Grant. Samples of some pieces below. A public event around this art will be held when gathering is less likely to cause Covid spread.
Physical copies are being shared; recipients of WATR artifacts are asked to refrain from passing on scanned or digital versions online, and to not in any way digitally distribute full pages or images.
Instead, they are encouraged to enjoy this art, and to use it to see and reflect upon cloaked oppressive governance in normalized technologies, to feel beauty and reality, and to gain inspiration to create more art and to work with others to push for legislation and other real protections of people over profit.
Snippet of page 5-6
Snippet of cover
An essay critiquing exploitative profiteering through US good-vibes-only historical amnesia and cavalier invulnerability in "reopening"/"repopulation" neoliberal narrative propaganda that, yet again, blames youth and common people for the violence they face, advocating spending as sole solace, and enriching authoritarianism amid a spreading virus this summer.
Written with Dr. Dvera I. Saxton, author of The Devil's Fruit: Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice (Rutgers, 2021).
A semiotic analysis of discourses of U.S. COVID-19 blame circulating on Facebook in summer 2020 through panopticonning, which we define in the article as a coercive social technology involving:
socially-affirmed self-policing that channels accountability away from those responsible for inequity within capitalism. To do so, panopticonning affirms discourses in neoliberal America that ignore structural oppression by identifying common people as the problem. ...
The impact of panopticonning on social media is that it takes away attention from powerful people who are creating unsafe conditions and puts focus on what is framed as marginalized people’s untrustworthiness, augmenting stories told in other parts of US society. A dominant theme in the images we analyzed is that they ignore the patchwork approach to state closures and reopenings, and the past federal government leadership’s refusal to inform the country about the deadly pandemic while delaying ordering and delivery of essential medical supplies and denying support for common people (Levy; Allen, et al.). Instead, these posts center upon the American people as the main threat to public safety by individualizing the source of social unsafety and identifying Americans as outsiders.
Written with Dr. Alexandra J. Cavallaro, Director of the Center for the Study of Correctional Education.
May 2021:
U.S. Youth and Media Migration public lecture archived
Lecture given for the University of Illinois' "Digital (Mis)Shaping of the World" Friday Forum series this spring is now available for viewing.
April 2021:
Book discount code to celebrate COVID-delayed unofficial book tour launch!
In honor of the paperback release of Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration, my publisher is giving 30% off copies through their website until July 2021 with the code LEX30AUTH21 (or Lex30Auth21)
March 2021:
Article on Gender & Titles in Academia panel
Cal State University's College of Social Sciences (COSS) wrote a lovely article on our panel earlier this spring
Spring 2021 talks:
April 2 12pm (CST): U.S. Youth and Media Migration talk for the
University of Illinois YMCA's Friday Forum
September 2020:
New article in The Public i
August 2020:
New article in Monthly Review
March 2020:
Named Fresno Tower District's Education 2020 Woman of the Year!
2020 awardees
With Councilmember Soria
February 2020:
2020 Urbana Arts Grant recipient!
I last wrote for and received an Urbana Arts Grant 10 years ago to enable the old-school country band I was in, Dottie and the 'Rail, to perform a sing-along tour of low-income senior housing centers.
I am thrilled to be supported in community arts work again!
I earned my PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I was a student of Christian Sandvig (Institute for Communication Research) and Reed Larson (adolescent development). I was a Fellow with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Myra Sadker Foundation, and the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, and a researcher with the Center for People and Infrastructures ("Infra Lab") at the University of Illinois.
In my final year of doctoral studies, I interned with Harvard University's Youth & Media project at the Berkman Klein Center on Internet and Society. That same year, I was one of five graduate students awarded the Provost's Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Prior to this, I received a Master's in educational psychology at Illinois under Robert Stake. My scholarship was influenced by Mary Lee Sargent and Soo Ah Kwon and by my advisors at Illinois, among others.
This site provides some general information on my general work. Thanks for stopping by.
Here is a nearby high Sierra lake I like to swim in and watch.
