“Randy Rodriguez: Writer and Social Critic” is my independently developed blog site where I write social and political criticism intermingled with commentary about my personal, everyday lived experience. I use my training as a cultural studies scholar to make connections between personal experience and larger cultural patterns, critically evaluating and exposing institutionalized hierarchies of power and inequality, and commenting with satirical and sarcastic force on the ironies of such patterns and the metaphors and rituals that support them uncritically and invisibly. In general, my site is a place for speculative and meditative creativity that resists preconceived, simple, predictably easy answers even as I occasionally represent and interrogate my life lived and imagined. I created the site in September 2009 and originally posted over fifty entries displaying a variety of personal experience and critical cultural commentary through 2010. I plan to now reengage my online posting of critical, innovative writing, and critical social commentary in this year (2020) of global panic and possibility.

UPDATE: On June 15 I was offered a full-time position for the 2021-2022 academic year as a lecturer in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where I will be teaching courses on Latina/o cinema, popular culture, history, and politics.

That work will be the focus of all my intellectual and personal efforts, thus leaving my essay writing and social criticism for another day and time when I can focus on it or when I have something absolutely crucial that needs to be said.

Thanks

Randy Rodriguez