Dr. Valerie Padilla Carroll

Interim Head and Professor

Leasure Hall 101B
Office hours by appointment
padillacarroll@k-state.edu
BA University of Texas at San Antonio
MA & PhD, Saint Louis University

 

 

Dr. Valerie Padilla Carroll is Interim Head and Professor in the Department of Social Transformation Studies at Kansas State University. Her classes often focus on environmental and food justice, popular culture, and social movements. Her current research centers on gender, race, and environmental history involving simple living and back-to-the-land popular culture. Her book, Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-land? Gender and Race in U.S. Self-Sufficiency Popular Culture (2022, University of Nebraska Press), examines media texts of those so often left out of the back-to-the-land promise. In her book, she focuses on BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ+ folks rewriting and reimagining back-to-the-land movements as collaborative, inclusive, and rooted in both human and ecological justice.

She is the Director of the Engaged Stories Lab at K-State, which trains students to research, analyze, and report the ways that Kansans imagine and enact individual, community, and cultural stories of resistance and resilience.

Research interests

Dr. Valerie Padilla Carroll researches the intersections of environmentalism and popular culture, environmental histories, environmental feminisms, and the sustainability and food justice movements. Her publications include articles on back-to-the-land, simple living, and film/television texts.

Select publications

Padilla Carroll, Valerie. (2022). Who Gets to go Back-to-the-Land: Gender, and Race in U.S. Self-Sufficiency Popular Culture (University of Nebraska Press). Summary: This book explores the history and meaning of U.S. self-sufficiency media texts as they illuminate the embedded race, gender, and heteronormative ideologies that reinforce dominant power and highlight the alternative stories of excluded peoples who rewrite and reimagine a more inclusive promise of self-sufficiency.

Padilla Carroll, Valerie. (2021). “Ralph and Myrtle Mae Borsodi’s Vision of Back-to-the-land as a White Heteropatriarchal Refugium during the Great Depression” in Environment & History, Special Issue: Placing Gender. 27:2, pp. 303-323.

Padilla Carroll, Valerie. (2018). "Introduction: Ecofeminism in Dialogue" in Ecofeminism in Dialogue, Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, eds. Lexington Books, pp. 1-123.

Padilla Carroll, Valerie. (2017). "Fables of Empowerment: Myrtle Mae Borsodi and Back-to-the-Land Housewifery in the Early Twentieth Century" in The Journal of American Culture. 40:2. pp. 111-125.

Padilla Carroll, Valerie. (2017) “Writing Women into Back-to-the-Land: Feminism, Appropriation, and Identity in the 1970s Feminist Magazine Country Women” in Women and Nature? Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment, Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. Routhledge, (2017). pp. 117-131.

Padilla Carroll, Valerie. (2016). “The Radical Possibilities of New (Feminist, Environmentalist) Domesticity: Housewifery as an Altermodernity Project” in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Winter 2016. pp. 51-70.

Courses

GWSS 275 Gender and Sex in Sci-Fi

GWSS 305 Advanced Fundamentals of Women's Studies

GWSS 350 Gender in American Film

GWSS 405 Resistance and Movements for Social Change

GWSS 480 Gender, Environment & Justice

GWSS 550 Gender in Popular Culture

GWSS 575 Gender and Food Justice

GWSS 610 Capstone in GWSS

GWSS 810 Theories and Methodologies