Rate My Professor Ashley Mack

Ashley Noel Mack is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Cultural Studies and Director of Forensics in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. They serve as affiliate faculty in the Department of African & African American Studies, Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, and Screen Arts Program. Mack earned a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin between 2007 and 2013, along with degrees from Arizona State University in Political Science with a focus on International Relations and in Women and Gender Studies from 2004 to 2007. Their career at LSU includes promotion to Associate Professor with tenure. Mack directs the Mixon Lyceum Speech and Debate Team and contributes to various university initiatives, including serving as a confidential supporter for sexual assault survivors.

Mack’s research investigates how dominant gender and sexual ideologies are communicated in public life through mediated discourses and how queer and feminist of color resistance is mobilized in response within U.S. media cultures. Methodologies span rhetoric, media, and cultural studies, addressing decolonial feminisms, queer studies, gendered violence, neoliberalism, motherhood, critical whiteness, and racial politics of disciplinary legitimacy. Key publications include “Our bodies are not terra nullius”: Building a decolonial feminist resistance to gendered violence (2019, Women’s Studies in Communication, with T.R. Na’puti, 181 citations); Critiquing state and gendered violence in the age of #MeToo (2018, Quarterly Journal of Speech, with B.J. McCann, 79 citations); The self-made mom: Neoliberalism and masochistic motherhood in home-birth videos on YouTube (2016, Women’s Studies in Communication, 60 citations); Communication’s quest for whiteness: the racial politics of disciplinary legitimacy (2020, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, with B.J. McCann and R. Self, 37 citations); and “Harvey Weinstein, monster”: antiblackness and the myth of the monstrous rapist (2021, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, with B.J. McCann, 28 citations). Mack holds editorial board positions for Rhetoric Politics Culture, Communication Monographs, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, contributing to the field’s scholarly discourse.