Carrie A. Rentschler

During her time at CASBS, Carrie Rentschler will be completing a book, Bystanding: Media Witnessing and Small Scale Social Change, which examines the transformation of the bystander from a passive observer to an agent of social change in the U.S. Starting with the infamous story of 37 witnesses who supposedly watched the 1964 murder of Catherine Genovese and did nothing to stop it, the book follows the figure of the bystander through mid-century social psychological research and teaching curricula that popularized the phenomenon of the “bystander effect”; popular media re-enactments of the murder; experiments that aimed to create witnesses who would stand in for failed bystanders; and contemporary feminist and anti-racist social movement materials that train bystanders to intervene. Today’s social movements imagine bystanders as people with the agency to stop or document acts of oppression and violence, often through a speech act or through using mobile media. The book examines how “being on standby,” with ready-to-hand internet-connected mobile devices, represents a new orientation for scalable social change.

Rentschler is an associate professor in the department of art history and communication studies and an associate member of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at McGill University.  Her research focuses on feminist movement activism, social media, gender violence, technology studies, and the politics of care and witnessing. She is author of Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and Media in the U.S. (Duke, 2011) and co-editor of Girlhood and the Politics of Place (Berghahn, 2016). In a new area of research, she is studying how Type 1 diabetes shapes the quantified self.  For more information, visit her faculty page at: https://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/people-contacts/faculty/rentschler