Dr. Caroline Kaltefleiter is Professor of Communication and Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at SUNY Cortland. She is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her innovative and intersectional teaching strategies advocate student-centered and discussion driven work with project-based learning. She was awarded an Honorary Faculty Kente Clothe for her commitment to incorporate issues of diversity, justice, and inclusion throughout her classes and media content. She was awarded a 2023 Community News Champion Fellowship from the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont.
Dr. Kaltefleiter earned her Ph.D. from the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University concentrating in transnational news production, cultural studies, and media studies with research specializations in auto-ethnography, ethnography, and frame and textual analysis. Her dissertation “Revolution Girl Style Now: Trebled Reflexivity and the Riot Grrrl Network was the first auto-ethnographic study of this girl-centered subculture.
She earned her MA in Film and Media Studies from Miami University, Ohio. She was also a member of the Center for Cultural Studies and studied with Professors Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren. Her thesis “The Propaganda Machines and the Persian Gulf War: A Critical Analysis of the Media’s Construction of the Dominant and Oppositional Scenarios of Representation” utilized footage from the CNN News archives and alternative news sources, including the Pacifica Radio Network. Trained as a broadcast journalist, Dr. Kaltefleiter graduated with an ABJ in Broadcast Journalism from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia and has worked as a reporter and anchor for numerous media outlets.
Her research focuses on punk collectives, social movements, radical pedagogy and DIY-culture with an emphasis on alternative media and zine culture. She is interested in radical forms of grassroots action and resistance to structures of domination. She seeks to record hidden and marginal histories, ideas, and communities to keep social movement knowledge alive.
As an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of race and class studies, gender studies, media, and cultural studies. her work explores youth digital culture and teens’ uses of social media. Her work includes community organizing and succession planning to engage youth by utilizing various mediums and platforms to document life experiences and action to address the climate crisis, food scarcity, and social inequality. She serves as the Executive Producer and Host of The Digital Divide, a weekly radio program/podcast that focuses on technology and digital culture that airs on the NPR station WSUC-FM at SUNY Cortland.
She is currently working on three major projects. The first is the Anarchism and Punk book series which she is co-editing with Jim Donaghey, Ulster, Northern Ireland, and Will Boisseau, London, United Kingdom. The first book in the series is Smash the System: Punk Anarchism as a Culture of Resistance (2022). The second book, DIY or DIE: Do-It-Yourself, Do-It-Together & Punk Anarchism was published in April 2024.
She is also working on a second project that focuses on anarchist-inspired movements organizing mutual aid. This utilizes auto-ethnographic and ethnographic research with mutual aid groups. Recent publications include: “Care and Crisis in David Graeber’s New York: Anarcha-Feminism, Gift Economies, and Mutual Aid Beyond a Global Pandemic” Anthropological Notebooks. Special Volume dedicated to the late David Graeber, December 2021 and The Bonnie Bike Project: A Discussion of a Mutual Aid Project in Central New York (under review).
Her latest work is a book project that extends her early research in Girls Studies and participation in the Riot Grrrl network. Adopting auto-ethnographic, ethnographic and textual analysis, she draws upon assemblage theory and cultural memory theories to examine influences of Riot Grrrl in feminist media production, girl centered cultural spaces, and contemporary activist actions.