Annie Hill | The University of Texas at Austin (original) (raw)

Books by Annie Hill

Edited Collections by Annie Hill

Anti-Trafficking Review, 2021

https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.201221171 The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the sit... more https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.201221171

The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the sites for anti-trafficking education and the range of educators who shape how the public and institutions understand and respond to human trafficking.

Women’s Studies in Communication, 2018

https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1544000 This forum engages entangled topics including wh... more https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1544000

This forum engages entangled topics including white supremacy, immigration, citizenship, native sovereignty, gender and sexual politics, and racialized representations by bringing together scholars working in queer migration studies (QMS) and critical trafficking studies (CTS).

Articles by Annie Hill

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2024

This essay analyzes the riverfront brawl in Montgomery, Alabama in 2023 to consider an instance w... more This essay analyzes the riverfront brawl in Montgomery, Alabama in 2023 to consider an instance when Black speech was met by white intransigence. I define white intransigence as a racist rhetorical convention that entails refusals to move in response to Black claims to public space. I then identify how Black bystanders on the riverfront enacted collective self-defense that beat back white intransigence through a radical rhetoric of embodied, confrontational movement. Lastly, I argue that overcoming white intransigence will require kinetic responses that force it to move.

Journal of American College Health, 2023

Objective: Describe Greek life students' perspectives of party culture, safety, and College Sexua... more Objective: Describe Greek life students' perspectives of party culture, safety, and College Sexual Violence (CSV) prevention. Participants: 27 US undergraduates: 5 fraternity underclassmen, 6 fraternity upperclassmen, 10 sorority underclassmen, 6 sorority upperclassmen. Methods: Students participated in one of four focus groups, separately by gender and academic year. Facilitation guide addressed partying, sexual violence, and safety. Results: Greek life members described partying preferences, perceived safety threats, and actions they took to party safely. University efforts to support safe partying were not universally viewed as helpful. Conclusions: Although Greek life students strive to create safe partying environments, there remain missed opportunities to mitigate risks related to CSV. The responsibility to ensure safe partying falls too heavily on students, resulting in universities missing opportunities to provide measures that promote safety while mitigating risks and potentially serious harms.

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2021

As COVID-19 ravages the United States, calls to police for COVID-related concerns are proliferati... more As COVID-19 ravages the United States, calls to police for COVID-related concerns are proliferating. This article asks what happens when a contagious and novel disease creates a context wherein neighbours recognise each other – by sight and by sound – as strangers. Marking the twentieth anniversary of Strange Encounters, we revisit Sara Ahmed’s claim that recognition in embodied encounters produces strangers as figures who are internal to community formation, but who remain outside of an imagined community. This claim enables us to parse the relational dynamics in pandemic time that produce neighbours as strangers through both visual and sonic registers. Ahmed’s theory helps to identify how disease opens opportunities to fracture and retract familiarity in ways that intensify police power and often racialised feelings of ‘stranger danger,’ in effect reordering neighbourly relations.

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2021

First Amendment Studies, 2020

In 2018, mobile phone videos went viral of white people calling police to report Black people for... more In 2018, mobile phone videos went viral of white people calling police to report Black people for engaging in innocuous conduct. Dubbed "white caller crime" by some commentators, mainstream and social media afforded serious and satiric attention to racist harassment via police calls. In this article, I analyze these police calls as a form of racist expression that operates as a call to harm. I begin by recounting three calls that went viral in consecutive months in 2018. I then theorize how the calls play out white supremacist and colonial logics of race and place, and I explore how viral publicity provides a viable strategy of resistance to racist expression. I close by contending that publicity, and the responses it has inspired, holds more promise for contesting racist police calls than a predictable turn to law and punishment under a hate speech framework.

Anti-Trafficking Review, 2019

A large body of scholarship has described the narrow set of media narratives used to report traff... more A large body of scholarship has described the narrow set of media narratives used to report trafficking for sexual exploitation to the public. This article examines US media coverage of human trafficking in relation to the Super Bowl, American football's championship game. Available empirical evidence does not suggest that major sporting events cause trafficking for sexual exploitation. Yet, we find that 76 per cent of US print media from 2010 to 2016 propagated the 'Super Bowl sex trafficking' narrative. Local coverage of the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was different, presenting a sceptical stance toward this narrative. The article describes how this substantial shift resulted from our research group and anti-trafficking stakeholders employing an action research approach to craft a Super Bowl communication strategy that aligned with empirical evidence. Although sensationalist narratives are difficult to dislodge, the Minnesota case shows that evidence on trafficking can be effectively used to inform media and impact public perceptions, when researchers work with stakeholders on the ground. Lessons learnt are shared to enable others to replicate these results.

The Gender Policy Report, 2018

Women’s Studies in Communication, 2018

In spring 2017, I participated in a panel at a Midwestern university, titled The Human Traffickin... more In spring 2017, I participated in a panel at a Midwestern university, titled The Human Trafficking Crisis: Strategies for Resistance. It was described to me as a debate on trafficking but turned out to be an anti-trafficking event with invited experts from law enforcement and an anti-trafficking nongovernmental organization (NGO). My presence appeared to make sense due to my anti-trafficking research and position as an assistant professor in gender, women, and sexuality studies. 1 Absent was anyone speaking from the perspective of being trafficked or being targeted by anti-trafficking policies and policing. Rather than debating whether there was a trafficking crisis, the panel took the form of public pedagogy describing the crisis and how to resist it locally. I argue, however, that the rhetorical situation did not simply describe but produced the "human trafficking crisis" by attaching it to racialized and gendered groups and addressing an audience primed to accept an anti-trafficking agenda. Drawing on critical trafficking and queer migration studies, I explore how the event situated the audience in a seemingly estranged relation to the crisis and instructed it to come closer-to intervene-by surveilling migrants and supplying care packages to women and girls.

PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, 2017

The Gender Policy Report, 2017

On October 5, 2017, the New York Times revealed that Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein, paid e... more On October 5, 2017, the New York Times revealed that Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein, paid eight settlements in response to allegations of sexual harassment, dating back to 1990. The article detailed a behavioral pattern in which Weinstein lured women into meeting with him on the pretense of work and then appeared in various states of undress, demanded a massage, touched women without consent, or asked them to watch him shower. Weinstein's conduct was condemned, but contextual questions soon emerged: who helped him create opportunities to harass and assault women, and who refused to see the harassment and hear victims' complaints? Many people privately knew about Weinstein's behavior. His sexual violence did not become public, however, due to the use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) in settlements with victims. Purportedly part of the solution to harassment (i.e., legal settlement), NDAs can facilitate harassment by keeping sexual violence secret and victims silent. 4/4 harassment to become a type of "trade secret" across professions, in academia as in Hollywood. In the wake of Weinstein, it is clear that contracting victims' speech means sexual violence will never be settled.

Anti-Trafficking Review, 2016

The article analyses a UK police raid in 2005 on a West Midlands massage parlour called Cuddles. ... more The article analyses a UK police raid in 2005 on a West Midlands massage parlour called Cuddles. This raid to rescue victims of trafficking reflects a state approach that, despite police claims to the media, is not victim-centred. In publicising the raid, the police and media participate in discriminatory practices that reproduce a master narrative of trafficking and cause harm to the women the state purports to protect. This article examines details of the Cuddles raid and its aftermath that are obscured in the official account and offers an alternative interpretation of raid photographs circulated by the media. Findings suggest the rights of women targeted in raids are disregarded and the harm they experience dismissed in order to amplify the state"s anti-trafficking agenda. Bringing a fuller story to the fore reveals that raids tell subjugated stories and create spectacles that can challenge the master narrative of trafficking disseminated to the British public.

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2016

Questions about the meaning and value of SlutWalk have generated considerable public debate. This... more Questions about the meaning and value of SlutWalk have generated considerable public debate. This article explores how SlutWalk subverts rape logic, rendering it apparent and absurd while circulating counterclaims to oppose sexual violence. By reclaiming "slut" through performative protest and political mobilization, SlutWalk offers trenchant critiques of rape logic's conflation of clothes and consent. Although media and feminist commentators alike met this protest strategy with skepticism, I argue that SlutWalk enacts a perifeminist response to rape logic that demonstrates the subversive power of reclaiming a name.

Review of Communication, 2016

Responding to Susan Sontag's groundbreaking text Illness as Metaphor, this article analyzes breas... more Responding to Susan Sontag's groundbreaking text Illness as Metaphor, this article analyzes breast cancer as a figure of entanglement, drawing on Karen Barad's theory of agential realism. Communication scholars have fruitfully explored discursive constructions of breast cancer, but a material-discursive analysis of the disease, and the significant site it inhabits, provides a more robust account of the constraints and opportunities configuring bodies and social movements. To make the case, I show that agential realism is equipped to grasp breast cancer's rhetoricity as it destabilizes binary codes of being, including language/matter, subject/object, and human/nonhuman. I then offer the concept of transmaterial intra-actionality to track entanglements of disease and target the political stakes of accounting for human and nonhuman life. I conclude with a call for corporeal solidarity: a posthuman politics that acknowledges connections across and through bodies.

Chapters by Annie Hill

The Conceit of Context: Resituating Domains in Rhetorical Studies, 2020

This chapter contextualizes the concept of necropolitics that Sara McKinnon applies to her study ... more This chapter contextualizes the concept of necropolitics that Sara McKinnon applies to her study of U.S.-Mexico relations and questions its application in this case. By doing so, I clarify the objects under analysis – the U.S. imaginary and diplomatic interventions to secure dominance – and I show how theories of sovereignty can offer a rigorous critique of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric. I interpret the U.S. accusation that Mexico is a “failing state” as an articulation of sovereignty and a strategy of transnational governance to incapacitate Mexico and force it into a bilateral security agreement. My interpretation reframes U.S.-Mexico relations via a theory of sovereign neomortality, which draws on but does not fully align with the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics. I contribute this critique because the misreading of context, how and where we are looking, risks applying concepts that fail to capture what we seek to comprehend.

Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism, University of Minnesota Press

This chapter interrogates the ideological foundations of New Labour’s articulation of the problem... more This chapter interrogates the ideological foundations of New Labour’s articulation of the problem of prostitution and its coordinated strategy to eliminate street sex work. I argue that efforts to divert women from sex work are part of a sympathetic shift in policy, premised on viewing prostitutes as victims of gender-based violence. Although the designation of “victim” suggests sympathy for sex workers, it mobilizes rehabilitative interventions to convert prostitutes into self-regulating, responsible citizens in line with neoliberal demands. Such interventions extend the law’s remit beyond sanctions for specific criminal acts to a wide range of medico-behaviorist exercises that turn the problem of prostitution into a personal one. This prescription demands that sex workers change even when their economic and social conditions remain the same. While the rehabilitative turn may be well-intentioned, its reliance on a crime-control framework privileges victimhood and punishes women who persist in prostitution.

Book Reviews by Annie Hill

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2018

Anti-Trafficking Review, 2021

https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.201221171 The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the sit... more https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.201221171

The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the sites for anti-trafficking education and the range of educators who shape how the public and institutions understand and respond to human trafficking.

Women’s Studies in Communication, 2018

https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1544000 This forum engages entangled topics including wh... more https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1544000

This forum engages entangled topics including white supremacy, immigration, citizenship, native sovereignty, gender and sexual politics, and racialized representations by bringing together scholars working in queer migration studies (QMS) and critical trafficking studies (CTS).

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2024

This essay analyzes the riverfront brawl in Montgomery, Alabama in 2023 to consider an instance w... more This essay analyzes the riverfront brawl in Montgomery, Alabama in 2023 to consider an instance when Black speech was met by white intransigence. I define white intransigence as a racist rhetorical convention that entails refusals to move in response to Black claims to public space. I then identify how Black bystanders on the riverfront enacted collective self-defense that beat back white intransigence through a radical rhetoric of embodied, confrontational movement. Lastly, I argue that overcoming white intransigence will require kinetic responses that force it to move.

Journal of American College Health, 2023

Objective: Describe Greek life students' perspectives of party culture, safety, and College Sexua... more Objective: Describe Greek life students' perspectives of party culture, safety, and College Sexual Violence (CSV) prevention. Participants: 27 US undergraduates: 5 fraternity underclassmen, 6 fraternity upperclassmen, 10 sorority underclassmen, 6 sorority upperclassmen. Methods: Students participated in one of four focus groups, separately by gender and academic year. Facilitation guide addressed partying, sexual violence, and safety. Results: Greek life members described partying preferences, perceived safety threats, and actions they took to party safely. University efforts to support safe partying were not universally viewed as helpful. Conclusions: Although Greek life students strive to create safe partying environments, there remain missed opportunities to mitigate risks related to CSV. The responsibility to ensure safe partying falls too heavily on students, resulting in universities missing opportunities to provide measures that promote safety while mitigating risks and potentially serious harms.

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2021

As COVID-19 ravages the United States, calls to police for COVID-related concerns are proliferati... more As COVID-19 ravages the United States, calls to police for COVID-related concerns are proliferating. This article asks what happens when a contagious and novel disease creates a context wherein neighbours recognise each other – by sight and by sound – as strangers. Marking the twentieth anniversary of Strange Encounters, we revisit Sara Ahmed’s claim that recognition in embodied encounters produces strangers as figures who are internal to community formation, but who remain outside of an imagined community. This claim enables us to parse the relational dynamics in pandemic time that produce neighbours as strangers through both visual and sonic registers. Ahmed’s theory helps to identify how disease opens opportunities to fracture and retract familiarity in ways that intensify police power and often racialised feelings of ‘stranger danger,’ in effect reordering neighbourly relations.

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2021

First Amendment Studies, 2020

In 2018, mobile phone videos went viral of white people calling police to report Black people for... more In 2018, mobile phone videos went viral of white people calling police to report Black people for engaging in innocuous conduct. Dubbed "white caller crime" by some commentators, mainstream and social media afforded serious and satiric attention to racist harassment via police calls. In this article, I analyze these police calls as a form of racist expression that operates as a call to harm. I begin by recounting three calls that went viral in consecutive months in 2018. I then theorize how the calls play out white supremacist and colonial logics of race and place, and I explore how viral publicity provides a viable strategy of resistance to racist expression. I close by contending that publicity, and the responses it has inspired, holds more promise for contesting racist police calls than a predictable turn to law and punishment under a hate speech framework.

Anti-Trafficking Review, 2019

A large body of scholarship has described the narrow set of media narratives used to report traff... more A large body of scholarship has described the narrow set of media narratives used to report trafficking for sexual exploitation to the public. This article examines US media coverage of human trafficking in relation to the Super Bowl, American football's championship game. Available empirical evidence does not suggest that major sporting events cause trafficking for sexual exploitation. Yet, we find that 76 per cent of US print media from 2010 to 2016 propagated the 'Super Bowl sex trafficking' narrative. Local coverage of the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was different, presenting a sceptical stance toward this narrative. The article describes how this substantial shift resulted from our research group and anti-trafficking stakeholders employing an action research approach to craft a Super Bowl communication strategy that aligned with empirical evidence. Although sensationalist narratives are difficult to dislodge, the Minnesota case shows that evidence on trafficking can be effectively used to inform media and impact public perceptions, when researchers work with stakeholders on the ground. Lessons learnt are shared to enable others to replicate these results.

The Gender Policy Report, 2018

Women’s Studies in Communication, 2018

In spring 2017, I participated in a panel at a Midwestern university, titled The Human Traffickin... more In spring 2017, I participated in a panel at a Midwestern university, titled The Human Trafficking Crisis: Strategies for Resistance. It was described to me as a debate on trafficking but turned out to be an anti-trafficking event with invited experts from law enforcement and an anti-trafficking nongovernmental organization (NGO). My presence appeared to make sense due to my anti-trafficking research and position as an assistant professor in gender, women, and sexuality studies. 1 Absent was anyone speaking from the perspective of being trafficked or being targeted by anti-trafficking policies and policing. Rather than debating whether there was a trafficking crisis, the panel took the form of public pedagogy describing the crisis and how to resist it locally. I argue, however, that the rhetorical situation did not simply describe but produced the "human trafficking crisis" by attaching it to racialized and gendered groups and addressing an audience primed to accept an anti-trafficking agenda. Drawing on critical trafficking and queer migration studies, I explore how the event situated the audience in a seemingly estranged relation to the crisis and instructed it to come closer-to intervene-by surveilling migrants and supplying care packages to women and girls.

PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, 2017

The Gender Policy Report, 2017

On October 5, 2017, the New York Times revealed that Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein, paid e... more On October 5, 2017, the New York Times revealed that Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein, paid eight settlements in response to allegations of sexual harassment, dating back to 1990. The article detailed a behavioral pattern in which Weinstein lured women into meeting with him on the pretense of work and then appeared in various states of undress, demanded a massage, touched women without consent, or asked them to watch him shower. Weinstein's conduct was condemned, but contextual questions soon emerged: who helped him create opportunities to harass and assault women, and who refused to see the harassment and hear victims' complaints? Many people privately knew about Weinstein's behavior. His sexual violence did not become public, however, due to the use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) in settlements with victims. Purportedly part of the solution to harassment (i.e., legal settlement), NDAs can facilitate harassment by keeping sexual violence secret and victims silent. 4/4 harassment to become a type of "trade secret" across professions, in academia as in Hollywood. In the wake of Weinstein, it is clear that contracting victims' speech means sexual violence will never be settled.

Anti-Trafficking Review, 2016

The article analyses a UK police raid in 2005 on a West Midlands massage parlour called Cuddles. ... more The article analyses a UK police raid in 2005 on a West Midlands massage parlour called Cuddles. This raid to rescue victims of trafficking reflects a state approach that, despite police claims to the media, is not victim-centred. In publicising the raid, the police and media participate in discriminatory practices that reproduce a master narrative of trafficking and cause harm to the women the state purports to protect. This article examines details of the Cuddles raid and its aftermath that are obscured in the official account and offers an alternative interpretation of raid photographs circulated by the media. Findings suggest the rights of women targeted in raids are disregarded and the harm they experience dismissed in order to amplify the state"s anti-trafficking agenda. Bringing a fuller story to the fore reveals that raids tell subjugated stories and create spectacles that can challenge the master narrative of trafficking disseminated to the British public.

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2016

Questions about the meaning and value of SlutWalk have generated considerable public debate. This... more Questions about the meaning and value of SlutWalk have generated considerable public debate. This article explores how SlutWalk subverts rape logic, rendering it apparent and absurd while circulating counterclaims to oppose sexual violence. By reclaiming "slut" through performative protest and political mobilization, SlutWalk offers trenchant critiques of rape logic's conflation of clothes and consent. Although media and feminist commentators alike met this protest strategy with skepticism, I argue that SlutWalk enacts a perifeminist response to rape logic that demonstrates the subversive power of reclaiming a name.

Review of Communication, 2016

Responding to Susan Sontag's groundbreaking text Illness as Metaphor, this article analyzes breas... more Responding to Susan Sontag's groundbreaking text Illness as Metaphor, this article analyzes breast cancer as a figure of entanglement, drawing on Karen Barad's theory of agential realism. Communication scholars have fruitfully explored discursive constructions of breast cancer, but a material-discursive analysis of the disease, and the significant site it inhabits, provides a more robust account of the constraints and opportunities configuring bodies and social movements. To make the case, I show that agential realism is equipped to grasp breast cancer's rhetoricity as it destabilizes binary codes of being, including language/matter, subject/object, and human/nonhuman. I then offer the concept of transmaterial intra-actionality to track entanglements of disease and target the political stakes of accounting for human and nonhuman life. I conclude with a call for corporeal solidarity: a posthuman politics that acknowledges connections across and through bodies.

The Conceit of Context: Resituating Domains in Rhetorical Studies, 2020

This chapter contextualizes the concept of necropolitics that Sara McKinnon applies to her study ... more This chapter contextualizes the concept of necropolitics that Sara McKinnon applies to her study of U.S.-Mexico relations and questions its application in this case. By doing so, I clarify the objects under analysis – the U.S. imaginary and diplomatic interventions to secure dominance – and I show how theories of sovereignty can offer a rigorous critique of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric. I interpret the U.S. accusation that Mexico is a “failing state” as an articulation of sovereignty and a strategy of transnational governance to incapacitate Mexico and force it into a bilateral security agreement. My interpretation reframes U.S.-Mexico relations via a theory of sovereign neomortality, which draws on but does not fully align with the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics. I contribute this critique because the misreading of context, how and where we are looking, risks applying concepts that fail to capture what we seek to comprehend.

Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism, University of Minnesota Press

This chapter interrogates the ideological foundations of New Labour’s articulation of the problem... more This chapter interrogates the ideological foundations of New Labour’s articulation of the problem of prostitution and its coordinated strategy to eliminate street sex work. I argue that efforts to divert women from sex work are part of a sympathetic shift in policy, premised on viewing prostitutes as victims of gender-based violence. Although the designation of “victim” suggests sympathy for sex workers, it mobilizes rehabilitative interventions to convert prostitutes into self-regulating, responsible citizens in line with neoliberal demands. Such interventions extend the law’s remit beyond sanctions for specific criminal acts to a wide range of medico-behaviorist exercises that turn the problem of prostitution into a personal one. This prescription demands that sex workers change even when their economic and social conditions remain the same. While the rehabilitative turn may be well-intentioned, its reliance on a crime-control framework privileges victimhood and punishes women who persist in prostitution.

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2018

Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center, University of Minnesota, 2016

We reviewed academic publications and analyzed US-based print media coverage on the connection be... more We reviewed academic publications and analyzed US-based print media coverage on the connection between mega-sporting events and sex trafficking in North America, Europe and South Africa. This report provides an overview of the most relevant findings for the work of the Super Bowl committee in Minneapolis.