Caroline Kaltefleiter to Address Honors Convocation

04/18/2017 

Caroline Kaltefleiter, interim chair of the Communication Studies Department and an international expert on the “Riot Grrrl” underground feminist movement of the early 1990s, will deliver the keynote address at SUNY Cortland’s annual Honors Convocation on Saturday, April 22.

The College will recognize 231 students for their academic accomplishments during the event, which begins at 7 p.m. in the Park Center Alumni Arena. An academic procession of SUNY Cortland faculty will open the Honors Convocation. A reception for the honorees and guests will follow in the same location.

	Caroline Kaltefleiter

Students will be acknowledged for a variety of achievements, including a top five percent ranking in their respective classes and for receiving College-wide and departmental awards and scholarships. The Donald Parish Brooks Scholarship Award will be presented to the residence hall having the highest cumulative grade point average.

Kaltefleiter, a SUNY Cortland professor, joined the College in 2001 as an associate professor. She chaired the Communication Studies Department from 2001-04.

She is a producer of radio programming on National Public Radio affiliate station WSUC-FM at SUNY Cortland. Her program, “The Digital Divide,” explores issues of new technology and youth culture.

In 2003, Kaltefleiter helped cut the ribbon on the multimedia studio at SUNY Cortland. She teaches courses including Communication and Social Change, Gender Communication, and Issues in Digital Culture.

Kaltefleiter encourages her students to engage in the community as their learn their field. For example, classes over the course of several years used their growing communications skills to help the local Cortland community raise $1 million to renovate the Wickwire Pool, a community facility that had been closed after falling into disrepair.

Previously, she also chaired the former Women’s Studies Program, now named Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Kaltefleiter has researched and spoken on “Riot Grrrl,” which has a name that signifies an angry growl. Born out of the punk-inspired music scene in Olympia, Wash., in the early 1990s, the movement became a social and political phenomenon promoting empowerment for young women. It was the precursor to politically active all-women music groups of today, such as Russia’s Pussy Riot.

This social movement was the focus of Kaltefleiter’s doctoral thesis, which she obtained in journalism and mass communication from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in 1996.

She also has a graduate certificate in gender and women’s studies from Ohio University and a master’s degree in mass communication from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where she was a graduate fellow in the Center for Cultural Studies. She received her bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Georgia.

Kaltefleiter has traveled the world giving presentations and conference papers. Along with SUNY Cortland colleagues Colleen Kattau, modern languages, and Mechthild Nagel, philosophy, she organized a panel, “Women’s Rights, Women’s Resistances,” on topics regarding globalization, the arts and prison, which they presented at the Human Rights in a Globalizing Era Conference at the University of Windsor, Canada. The panel was sponsored by Wagadu, an e-Journal of transnational women’s and gender studies based at SUNY Cortland.

Kaltefleiter also gave two papers at the British Sociological Association conference in Harrogate, England, “Representing Sovereignty and Nationalism: A Genealogy and Construction of Visual Rhetorics” and “Anatomically Correct: A Riot Grrrl Zines and Gender Representations.”

While in the United Kingdom, Kaltefleiter also took part in an invited symposium on political communication and digital culture, coordinated by colleagues at the London School of Economics and Middlesex University.

Last year, Kaltefleiter presented at the Anarchist Studies Network Conference in the U.K., hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Loughborough University. The conference theme was Anarcha-Feminism and her talk was titled, “Who Has the Microphone? Anarchy, Action and (R)evolution of the Riot Grrrl Movement.”

The 2017 Honors Convocation Ceremony will be available via live stream and can be accessed on the SUNY Cortland webpage on the day of the event. A reception will be held immediately following the ceremony for all students, guests, faculty and staff.

For more information, contact Samantha Howell, special events coordinator for the President’s Office, at 607-753-5453.

Prepared by Communications Office writing intern Jessica Haverlin