Dr. Beutin's research focuses on the racial politics of communication and social justice, with a particular interest in how memories and metaphors of slavery and abolition are mobilized in contemporary social movements. She is the author of Trafficking in Antiblackness: Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, and Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Canadian Communication Association and the 2024 Shepherd Book Prize in the Humanities from McMaster. She has held fellowships at the African American Studies department at Princeton University and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She earned her PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been involved with community projects for farmworker rights, queer liberation, prison abolition, and racial justice. Her writing has appeared in Cultural Studies, Surveillance & Society, Feminist Media Studies, Anti-Trafficking Review, Feminist Anthropology, and Southern Cultures. At McMaster, Dr. Beutin's teaching focuses on centering histories of dispossession, resistance, and racial justice within core communication concepts such as technology, globalization, liberalism, capitalism, and sovereignty.
Research interests:
Black and African diaspora studies; critical media studies; memory of slavery and abolition; racial liberalism and racial capitalism; surveillance studies; critical disability studies and care; museum studies; critical data and NGO studies; media ethnography; creative research methods; U.S. in transnational perspective; reparations, redress and racial justice; rhetoric of social movements; critical anti-trafficking studies.
Teaching interests:
Critical race studies, media literacy, critical theory, communication studies, globalization, museums and public culture, social movements and activism, memory studies
Graduate supervisory areas:
race, representation, cultural studies, surveillance (histories, technologies, and cultures), social justice, visual culture, gender and sexuality, structural analysis of global white supremacy and its cultures, rhetorical analysis, Foucauldian discourse analysis, critical theory
