University of New Mexico
Department of Communication & Journalism
UNM Lobo  
Susana Martínez Guillem, Ph.D.
 Ph.D., University of Colorado-Boulder, 2012
 Office: Room 232
 susanam@unm.edu

Assistant Professor 
Communication 

Profile:

Dr. Martínez Guillem is originally from Spain. She came to the United States to start her graduate studies in 2000. Before moving to New Mexico, she spent her time between Europe and the U.S., living in Iowa, Italy, Spain and Colorado. Her research and teaching interests are in critical discourse studies, cultural studies, interpretive and critical approaches to intercultural communication, and rhetorics of immigration, race and racism in the European Union and the United States.

Research:

My work focuses on the interactions between cultural practices and social processes. More specifically, I am interested in exploring how particular understandings of notions such as "immigration," "(anti)racism," "tolerance" or "multiculturalism" both reflect and help to (re)create our material conditions. I am currently working on different projects examining how beliefs and practices related to these contemporary keywords are embedded in practices such as law making, public television programming, and social movements. Currently, I am exploring these dynamics as they unfold in the contexts of the European Union and Spain. My goal is to expand the locus of this research in order to explore (dis)similarities across the Western world, as well as how these compare to non-Western realities.

I am convinced that the best scholarship comes out of grappling with productive tensions among different methods, theories and disciplines. In my research I draw from the Discourse Studies as well as the Cultural Studies traditions, together with scholarship on race, ethnicity and whiteness across the humanities and the social sciences. I find these theoretical and practical intersections necessary as I try to develop a research agenda that aims at approaching complex phenomena in a holistic way.

Sample Publications:

Teaching Style: As an instructor—and following Freire—I see education as the "practice of freedom." I am thus committed to transmitting the importance of understanding all kinds of communication processes, as well as how they relate to the broader social reality we all help to (re)create. For this reason, I always start my classes by asking students: "What is X, and why should we study it?" I believe that addressing this question can help all of us establish those necessary connections between academia and our everyday lives, and hopefully create space for a sense of responsibility to act upon the material world in order to improve it.

Authors: Pierre Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton, Eduardo Galeano, Raymond Williams, Ruth Wodak and (too) many more!

Spare time: I enjoy cooking, trying new food, spending fun times with my family and traveling whenever and wherever I can.

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