Lecturer in Hispanic Media and Digital Communications, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
Rachel’s research interests encompass Latin American cultural studies. Her current project examines the depiction of paid domestic workers in post-dictatorship Latin American cultural production, including film, documentary, literary testimony and digital culture. It interrogates the legacy of slavery that weighs on the relationships between domestic workers and the families that employ them by drawing on postcolonial theory and studies of cinematic affect.
Her doctoral thesis explored the representation of children and adolescents in contemporary Brazilian, Chilean and Colombian cinema. The project related the adoption of a children’s rights discourse in these countries since the 1990s to recent attempts to evoke children’s agency and subjectivity on film. Rachel is particularly interested in the relationship between childhood and the social construction of gender, innocence and national identity. This research was published as Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Lexington Books, 2017).
Recent publications:
- Randall, R, 2021, ‘Paid to Care: Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture’. University of Texas Press.
- Maguire, G & Randall, R, 2018, ‘New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema’. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
- Randall, R, 2018, ‘”Eu não sou o meu pai!”: Deception, Intimacy and Adolescence in (the) Casa grande’. In: Geoffrey Maguire, Rachel Randall (eds) New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan.