Dr. Carolin Aronis (she/her/היא) studies current antisemitism as associated with white supremacy in the U.S., specifically the practice of targeting college students or larger urban Jewish (and non-Jewish) communities. Dr. Aronis is interested in ways this has sustained a climate of fear, trauma, and intimidation. Through the intersection of critical media studies, rhetoric, and technologies, this specific work focuses on rhetorical and technological systems of hate and exclusion.
In a broader co-authored project with Dr. Eric Aoki (from Communication Studies at CSU), they study nooses and Nazi swastikas as involved in two different historical murderous practices with manifestations on U.S. campuses today against Black, Jewish and other communities. They offer a new conceptual understanding of perpetrator-installations, calling to expand the common heuristic frame from “hate symbols” to “technologies of violence,” explaining their instrumentalities and performative doing, along with their various rhetorical, material, and spatial political agencies.
Dr. Aronis’s solo work has developed focus on theorizing the technological operation of the Nazi swastika as a matter and a medium on campus, and on new ways that absurdly enough unify a dispersed and divided community. With other colleagues, and alone, she works on other projects that examine white mediation of the Black voice, Jewish motherhood and media, and the politics of liminal architecture in the city.
This semester she teaches the newly developed elective course, “Antisemitism Uncovered: From Rhetoric to Violence” (ETST 257), where she sheds light on the long history and current complexities of antisemitism and Jew-hatred through various methodological approaches related to discourse, media, spaces, and technologies. This course opens a door to examining Jewish identities, intersectionality, and different perspectives on issues like race, ethnicity, religion, privilege, relationship to faraway lands, and white nationalism. Other courses she teaches are Ethnicity and the Media (ETST 205) and Introduction to Ethnic Studies (ETST 100).