Title: Assistant Professor of Digital Media & Ethnography
Degrees: B.A. (Hons), McMaster University; M.A., University of Toronto; Ph.D., Toronto Metropolitan University & York University
Email: mdevries@allegheny.edu
Phone: (814) 332-3203
Office Location: VCCA 309
Spring 2024 Office Hours: Mondays 12:00-3:00pm; Wednesdays 11:30am-2:30pm
Melody Devries is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media & Ethnography at Allegheny College. In the classroom, Devries’ teaching style is flexible, student centered, and pursues a politics of care and conversation. Her courses span topics of media, popular culture, gender, race, and digital ethnography. Devries approaches these concepts with a mixture of insights from History, Queer and Feminist theory, Critical Theory, and De-Colonial and Anti-Racist literature.
Drawing from her PhD (ABD) in Communication & Culture from Toronto Metropolitan University and her Masters in Anthropology from the University of Toronto, Devries’ research has used digital and auto-ethnographic methods to investigate the social processes and material relations that compel spiritual-political conviction. Generally, her work and publications emphasize the importance of studying systemic, affective, and embodied conditions when researching far right and/or conspiratorial worldviews. Her most recent publication with University of Minnesota Press, Real- Making with Boundary Images, uses ethnographic methods to explore how everyday interactions with mediated images help maintain seamless political ontologies. Devries’ current research interests include the politics of cottage-core content on Instagram and TikTok, conspiracies surrounding the effects of climate change, and the pragmatic function of contradiction to various ideologies and subcultures.