Rebecca Kinney

Affiliation
Associate Professor, School of Cultural and Critical Studies and American Culture Studies

Office: 108 East Hall
Office Phone: 419-372-4378
Email: rkinney@bgsu.edu
Website: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/beautiful-wasteland
Twitter: @rebeccajkinney

Rebecca J. Kinney is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar of race, place, and popular culture. She teaches courses on race and popular culture and qualitative research methods. Dr. Kinney’s book, Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) argues that contemporary stories told about Detroit’s potential for rise enable the erasure of white privilege and systemic racism in the past and present. Through situating Detroit as “beautiful wasteland” she examines how the racialized mythology of the frontier in American culture is redeployed in the stories we tell about the raise, fall, and potential for rise again in Detroit. Dr. Kinney is currently at work on a book-length study, Rust Belt Chinatowns: Restaurants, Race, and Redevelopment in the Twenty First Century which analyzes the complexities of race and redevelopment by looking at “Asian American” space. By placing Asian American space at the center of a Rust Belt story her ethnographic research simultaneously challenges the coastal bias of Asian American Studies and the black-white bias of studies of the urban Great Lakes. 

Educational Background: 
Ph.D., Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
M.A., Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
B.A., American Culture and Sociology, University of Michigan

BGSU Courses Taught: 
ETHN 1300: Introduction to Asian American Studies
POPC 1600: Introduction to Popular Culture
POPC 4600xETHN4800: Narrative of Race and Place in Contemporary American Film
POPC 4600xETHN4800: Race, Place, and Popular Culture
CCS 4850: Qualitative Research Methods
CCS 4860: Capstone Seminar
POPC 6800: Cultural Tourism
ACS 7100: Doing American Studies: A Course in Qualitative Methods
ACS 7800: Placing an Interdisciplinary Methodology

PUBLICATIONS

Most available here: https://bgsu.academia.edu/RebeccaJKinney

Books

2016    Kinney, Rebecca J. Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier, University of Minnesota Press.

Refereed Articles

2017    Kinney, Rebecca J. “Riding Shotgun with an L.A. Son: Narratives of Race, Place, and Mobility in Roy Choi’s Culinary Autobiography” Forthcoming from Food, Culture & Society, in press Issue 20.1 (March 2017)

2015    Kinney, Rebecca J. “The Auto-Mobility of Gran Torino’s American Immigrant Dream: Cars, Class, and Whiteness in Detroit’s Post-Industrial Cityscape,”Race & Class, July-September, Vol. 57, Issue 1: pp. 51-66.

2014    Kinney, Rebecca J. “’But I Don’t See Race’: Teaching Popular Culture and Racial Formation Theory in an Era of Colorblindness,” Transformations, Vol. XXIV No. 1 & 2, pp. 40-55.

Reprint:
Kinney, Rebecca J. “ ‘But I Don’t See Race’”: Teaching Popular Culture and Racial Formation.” Children’s Literature Review. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 203. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2015. Prod. Layman Poupard. 49-56. Print.

2012    Kinney, Rebecca J. “Longing for Detroit: The Naturalization of Racism through Ruin Porn and Digital Memories,” Media Fields Journal, Fall 2012, Issue 5: pp. 1-14.

Invited Essays

2017       Kinney, Rebecca J. “Detroit is Closer Than You Think,” invited essay for Radical History Review, Volume 2017, Issue number 129, Fall 2017, pp. 164-176.

2017       Kinney, Rebecca J. “Author Response: Beautiful Wasteland,” invited Author Response to Reviews of Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Book Review Symposium, May 2017, pp: 1-12.

Book Chapters

2004    Kinney, Rebecca J. “Seoul Searching” in Asian American X: A Collection of 21^st Century Asian American Voices, Arar Han and John Hsu eds., 2004.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: pp. 52-57.

Book Reviews

2008   Kinney, Rebecca J. “Review of Linda Trinh Võ’s Mobilizing an Asian American Community,” Amerasia Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2008.

SELECTED COFERENCE PRESENTATIONS (REFEREED)

Panel Organizer and/or Chair

2017    Panel Organizer and Chair, “Centering the Midwest in Transnational Asian American Studies,” under consideration for the Association for Asian American Studies Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (April 2017)

2017    Panel Organizer and Chair, “Revisiting Kay Anderson’s ‘The Idea of Chinatown’: Asian American Place in the 21^st Century,” under consideration for the Association of American Geography Annual Meeting, Boston, MA (April 2017)

2016    Panel Organizer, “Whose Home/Not Home in 21^st Century Detroit,” accepted for American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (November 2016)

2016    Panel Chair, “Race, Gender, and Capitalism in Detroit and St. Louis” for Mid-America American Studies Association Conference, Lawrence, KS (March 2016)

2013    Panel Organizer and Chair, “Disrupting the ‘American Dream’ Narrative of Education” for the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Bi-Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL (September 2013)

2009    Panel Organizer and Chair, “Where is Class in the Academy?” a panel presented by the First Generation Graduate Student Network, University of California, San Diego (May 2009)

Papers Presented

2017    “Rust Belt Asian America: A Geographic Meditation/Mediation,” under consideration for the Association for Asian American Studies Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (April 2017)

2017    “The ‘Idea of Chinatown’ Rust Belt Style: Restaurants, Race and Redevelopment,” under consideration for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston, MA (April 2017)

2017    “Author Meets Critics: Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier,” under consideration for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston, MA (April 2017)

2016    “Detroit’s Brush Park Mansions From Ruin to Rehab Addict: Narratives of Race,     Ruin, and Rehabilitation” accepted for presentation at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (November 2016)

2016    “This is LA, Son: Roy Choi’s Constructions of Pan-Immigrant Los Angeles,” Association for Asian American Studies Annual Meeting, Miami, FL (April 2016)

2016    “Detroit as Boom Town: Racial Capitalism and Gold Cash Gold,” Mid-America American Studies Association Conference, Lawrence, KS (March 2016)

2014    “Touring Detroit: Signifying Authenticity in 21^st Century Tourist Itineraries,” American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA (November 2014)

2014    “ ‘Re’ Imagining the Past: Narratives of Racial Nostalgia in Detropia,” Humanities Center Fall Symposium “re: the city”, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI (October 2014)

2013    “Choosing Detroit: The Invisibility of Structural Racism in the Neoliberal City.” American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (November 2013)

2013    “College Debt and First Generation College Students: What is our role as Ethnic Studies Educators?” Critical Ethnic Studies Association Bi-Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL (September 2013)

2013    “ ‘Detroit Can’t Wait’: Constructing the “Post-Industrial Frontier,”Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA (April 2013)

2012    “Exploring the Post-Industrial Frontier: Shifting Representations of Detroit,”Urban History Association Bi-Annual Meeting, New York, NY (October 2012)

2012    “Making Racism Visible: Detroit’s Remapping,” Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, New York, NY (February 2012)

2011    “Re-reading Gran Torino: The Crisis of Masculinity, Whiteness, and the Immigrant Dream in Post-Racial Detroit,” Detroit, Global City: The Motor City in the World Conference, Wayne State University (September 2011)

2008    “Race-ing America’s Finest City: From Spanish Fantasy Past to Multicultural Fantasy Future,” California Cultures Graduate Fellows Roundtable, University of California, San Diego (February 2008)

2006    “eRaced Space: Performing and (Re)Producing Racial Identity in San Diego’s Asian Pacific Thematic Historic District,” Association for Asian American Studies Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA (March 2006)

2006    “eRaced Space: Performing and (Re)Producing Racial Identity in San Diego’s Asian Pacific Thematic Historic District,” National Association of Ethnic Studies Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (March 2006)

Selected Service 
Editorial Board Member, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.
Founder, BGSU Women of Color Alliance
Chair, Stoddard O’Neill Undergraduate Scholarship Committee
Curriculum Committee Member, School of Cultural and Critical Studies