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Doctoral Student Rebecca Wissink
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I'm looking for...
Study participants
Beginning in the spring of 2025 I will start my Doctoral research. I am seeking women-identifying persons who have travelled alone that are willing to be interviewed, either alone, or in a group.
Background
Educational Background
Bachelor of arts degree Sociolology/Anthropology, and Media and Communications, University of the Fraser Valley, 2019
Master of arts degree Cultural Studies, Queen's University, 2021
Biography
My professional goal is to become a media professor and spend my time either researching the "bad object" or talking about such research with students.
I returned to school in 2015 as a mature student 23 years after my first attempt at college. In those intervening years I raised a son, did the family thing, and had a very unfulfilling career for 15 years with the federal government. In my early forties I decided to retire. And start travelling. I took a few years off to think about life and do some exploration before I decided university was the path. Returning to school has been incredibly gratifying. Mind-blowing. Exhausting. I found my place and my people.
During my undergrad, my favourite classes were about The Simpsons, zombies, world religions, dying and death, deviance, and sexuality/gender. I was also very blessed to partake in directed readings classes designed for me that allowed me to dive into the topics of neoliberalism, women's solo travel narratives in popular culture, and Shameless (US version). Those topics and early research efforts have informed both my master's and doctoral research. I consider myself a feminist media student/scholar, firmly rooted in the tradition of Cultural Studies.
Research
Areas of Research
My doctoral research explores the gendered cultural possibilities and nodes of connection between feminism, women’s solo travel, and women's travel media. Over the past decade, there has been an increase in popular media texts centered on women’s solo travel – from Eat, Pray, Love to Wild. Most often, this travel is discursively positioned as empowering for the women protagonist, a source of autonomy, and self-exploration (Hamid et al., 2021). Beyond these popular media texts, women’s solo travel is becoming more prolific, with social media platforms hosting groups dedicated to the phenomenon and women travel influencers producing content documenting their solo journeys. Taken together, I understand these diverse media texts as a genre I call feminized travel media that frames femininity and solo travel as a path to a form of feminist empowerment for women. This project aims to explain and describe the cultural and political significance of feminized travel media as a genre by questioning how solo women travelers make meanings from these prolific media texts, theorizing both as an expression of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018), a feminism that is widely circulated in media.
My master's research (2021) interrogated the gentrification scenes in the US version of Shameless. By narrating the stories of members of a large, normatively dysfunctional, poor, White family in present-day urban Chicago, Shameless articulates subjective positionalities of the working-poor and barely working-class. In choosing to tell stories from the perspective of economically disadvantaged protagonists, this series diverges from a normative, middle-class televisual representation. The show is also unusual in how it deploys the technical codes of television: Shameless toys with televisual conventions and articulates its own discursive logics about the neighbourhood and class. Further, the show deploys an Us versus Them binary predicated on class unpredictably, that is, this binary does not faithfully adhere to logics that a particular political stance would seem to demand. My key findings are that despite its potentially subversive choice of protagonists and use of storylines that expose some of the causes and consequences of gentrification, Shameless leaves several structural causes under-illuminated. The reasons for this are twofold. First, Shameless’s unreliability as a text compromises its ability to offer a sustained critique of public policy, particularly as it relates to the urban restructuring process of gentrification. Second, Shameless individualizes the gentrifier and focuses on the socio-cultural aspects of the process, thus its narrative logics silence neoliberal capitalism’s role in gentrification.
Participation in university strategic initiatives
Awards
- Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) Doctoral award, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). 2024
Publications
- The Future of Work Post-Pandemic. Hon. Hugh Segal, Juliana Orlando Rohr, & Rafayet Newaz. Queen's University. 70-86. (2021)
In the News
- Using social media to plan your trip may not turn out the way you want. University of Calgary News. (2023)
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