About

Michelle Rodino-Colocino is a faculty member associated with the Media Effects Research Lab at Penn State. The provided page text does not include specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions. Therefore, there is no available biographical information to summarize.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Economics
• Aesthetics
• Medicine
• Anthropology
• Psychology
• Political economy
• Economy
• Gender studies
• History
• Engineering

Selected publications

• A Pand(acad)emic Plea for Self-Care and Shorter Hours

  Communication Culture and Critique · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• The Gig Economy

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses examines the experience of and resistance to exploitative aspects of the gig economy with a range of expertise in the communication discipline, employing multiple theoretical perspectives and methodologies in a variety of national contexts. It considers the roles that media, policy, culture, and history play as well as gender, immigrant status, ethnic background, and racial identity in forging working conditions in the “gig economy.” The book explores notion that the gig economy is something novel, rooted strictly in technological change. It provides historical context by looking at labor that has long been precarious—as well as gendered and racialized—such as taxi driving, domestic work, sex work, and academic work but where modes and experiences of exploitation and resistance are shifting in the contemporary context alongside digital technology.

  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Medicine

  The complaint emphasized labor law’s inability to protect gig workers, resulting in a system of “forced labor” where workers, particularly workers of color, risked losing income as well as catching and spreading the virus. Gig workers further mobilized to draw attention to such converging injustices. The history of capitalism is a history of worker exploitation. The set of convergences people call “the gig economy,” now including the Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic, increases the risk of doing business without boosting rewards in industries that have long been gig reliant. The COVID pandemic has only sharpened these dynamics. Colleges and universities across the United States (US) employ an ever-increasing menu of internet apps and startup companies to enhance socially distant teaching and enter into temporary, ad hoc, relationships with nonunionized workers who write code, manage accounts, promote apps, and work with customers. Gig workers are poised to fundamentally transform our economy.

  PublisherDOI

• AltNCA Comes to UDC: How Should Academic Associations “Fight for Humanity”?

  Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2019-04-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Taking UDC’s 2018 conference theme as a prompt, I put together a panel asking participants, “How Should Academic Associations ‘Fight for Humanity’?” after organizing alternative accommodations for NCA’s (National Communication Association) 103rd convention because of a boycott of Texas, the host state. Immigration activists and the State of California were boycotting Texas anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ laws, respectively. As organizing this alternative convention moved forward, and indeed, at the convention itself, I found myself asking the same questions that inspired UDC’s founding three decades ago: What is an academic association for? How can an academic association politically mobilize through a union of radical scholars to work for justice, equity, and peace?This essay engages these questions and asks UDC members to build a solidarity network to support each other in the fight for humanity.

  PublisherDOI

• Afterword Meet Me at the Gates

  2019-11-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Words and knowledge of history are necessary but are not enough; collective action, coalition-building, and solidarity must be part of our activism. Labor activists view the raid as retaliation for workers’ multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit settlement with Koch Industries, whose chicken processing plants were targeted. Creating learning environments in which students discuss their grief following gun massacres allows them to find ways to make the world—a world that is both of and “off” campus—safer and more equitable and humane. This work is activist in the deepest sense of the word because it is world-changing for the people it affects. Activism and Rhetoric details some of the ways that readers may take action as scholars to end oppression and promote social justice on and around our workplaces. Researching and teaching rhetoric afford opportunities to effect social justice. With privilege comes responsibility to create social justice.

  PublisherDOI

• Me too, #MeToo: countering cruelty with empathy

  Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies · 2018-01-02 · 141 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Critical and cultural studies scholars have long debated the promise and perils of pressing empathy, the sensation of shared feelings and experiences, into toppling systems of oppression and its at...

  PublisherDOI

• Flexing Italian American Masculinity and White Diversity on<i>Man Caves</i>

  Women s Studies in Communication · 2018-07-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This textual analysis of Man Caves explores how former National Football League (NFL) star turned DIY Network host Tony “Goose” Siragusa uses Italian American stereotypes of the funny fatso, gangster, and unskilled worker, rooted in his life story, to “flex” hegemonic masculinity in ways that articulate what I call White diversity. This contradictory identity claims both victimhood and privilege for White ethnic masculinity. Analyzing Siragusa’s flexing of Italian American masculinity is especially timely in our present historical moment when White supremacists claim ethnic “diversity” to assert an aggrieved status without disavowing privilege. Siragusa’s flexing of Italian American masculinity reflects the wider historical moment in which White men, beyond White power movements, may claim an aggrieved but privileged status. The conclusion considers ways out of White diversity that feminist scholar-activists may pursue.

  PublisherDOI

• #ThisEndsHere: Ending Sexual Harassment and Assault at Penn State

  Communication Culture and Critique · 2018-07-17 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We want to end sexual harassment and assault at Penn State. Following Tarana Burke’s intersectional Me Too movement to build empowerment for survivors through empathy, how can we create solidarity and collective action via empathy across our various communities of students and employees and in the wider communities of State College and Centre County, PA (Adetiba, 2017; Garber, 2018; “Meet Tarana Burke,” 2017; Rodino-Colocino, 2018)? How can we move women, men, and nonbinary students, faculty, and staff at Penn State and members of our town and county, across socioeconomic divides, ethnic backgrounds, national origins, racial identities, and sexual orientations to stand together to end sexual harassment and assault? Our personal experiences as survivors, advocates, and healers at Penn State and at other institutions of higher learning make us painfully aware of the devastation that sexual harassment and assault causes and that research documents. Being a victim of sexual assault can derail even the most dedicated student. Women who have been sexually assaulted in their freshman year of college, for example, tend to have lower GPAs than those of peers who have not been sexually assaulted (Jordan, Combs, & Smith, 2014). Sexual harassment and assault combine with discriminatory hiring and promotion practices to keep women out of fields across academia, from STEM to the Humanities (Kaplan & Guarino, 2018; Northcut, 2017); they create hostile work environments for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and staff (Flaherty, 2017; Richman et al., 1999; Stabile, 2017).

  PublisherDOI

• Neo-Orthodox Masculinities on <i>Man Caves</i>

  Television & New Media · 2017-06-01 · 22 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Male exclusive spaces enable and dismiss discussion of misogynist violence, as they did during the 2017 U.S. presidential election. In the decade and a half prior, men-only, homosocial, domestic “man caves” became a cultural trend. Given man caves’ popularity and potential to enable patriarchal oppression, we ask: what do man caves suggest about masculinity’s vitality in an era wherein patriarchy reigns, but challenges to hegemonic masculinity are evident? To answer, we textually analyze Man Caves, DIY (Do-It-Yourself) cable channel’s renovation reality show. From a feminist perspective, we examine how Man Caves constructs “neo-orthodox masculinity,” our term for masculinity that recovers and challenges old forms of masculine capital. Through mutually contradictory themes, Man Caves makes over masculinity in ways that respond to feminism as a movement to end patriarchy. We conclude by considering how feminist anger, hope, and activism may exploit the vulnerabilities that neo-orthodox masculinity highlights.

  PublisherDOI

• Professors and (M)others: Smashing the "Maternal Wall"

  2017-06-26

  book1st authorCorresponding

Frequent coauthors

• Safiya Noble

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Molly Niesen

  2 shared

• Christine Quail

  McMaster University

  2 shared

• Lauren J. DeCarvalho

  University of Denver

  2 shared

• Chenjerai Kumanyika

  Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

  2 shared

• Todd Wolfson

  1 shared

• Stephanie N. Berberick

  Washington and Jefferson College

  1 shared

• Carly Weiss

  1 shared

Labs

• Media Effects Research LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Communication

  University of Pennsylvania

  2006

• M.A., Communication

  University of Pennsylvania

  2002

• B.A., Communication Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1999

Awards & honors

• Article of the Year Award by the Division of Critical and Cu…
• Deans' Excellence Award for Research and Creative Activity (…