- Associate Professor
- Email: alapastina@tamu.edu
- Office: BLTN 202F
- Document: CV
Biography
Dr. La Pastina’s research program operates in two registers. First, relying on long term ethnographic work, he has investigated how communities, normally away from urban centers, engage with mediated forms of communication. His primary locus of analysis has been on a community in rural Rio Grande do Norte in Northeast Brazil, his main research site since 1996. In the last decade, he has moved most of his ethnographic practice to online spaces continuing to work with the same community and investigating how new technologies have been appropriated and incorporated in the everyday. Secondly, his work engages with textual analysis of media products, particularly those incorporating representations of non-mainstream populations. He has written on indigenous representations and gender minorities in Brazil, as well as the representation of Brazil as a nation. Advancing a historical analysis of these representations, his work looks at how memory plays a role in the production and interpretation of those images about the other.
Courses Taught
- Comm 335: Intercultural Communication
- Comm 365: International Communication
- Comm 458: Global Media
- Comm 615: Interpretive & Critical Methods
- Comm 658: Seminar in Communication and Culture - Representation
- Comm 663: Seminar in Media Studies – Media Audiences
Research Interests
- Humanities & Critical/Cultural Studies
- Media, Culture, and Identity
Selected Publications
- La Pastina, A. (2018). Reproducing Colonial Fantasies: The Indigenous Other in Brazilian Telenovelas. In Pace, R. (Ed.) From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans: Indigenous Media Production and Engagement in Latin America. Nashville, TN Vanderbilt University Press.
- La Pastina, A., Straubhaar, J., & Sifuentes, L. (2014). Why do I feel I don’t belong in the Brazil on TV? Popular Communication, 2, 2, 104-116.
- La Pastina, A. (2013). Watching Telenovelas in Brazil: Mediating the Everyday. In A. N. Valdivia (Gen. Ed.) & R. Parameswaran Ed.), The international encyclopedia of media studies. Vol. 3: Audience and interpretation in media studies. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
- La Pastina, A. (2006). The implications of an ethnographer’s sexuality. Qualitative Inquiry, 12, 4, 724-735.
- La Pastina, A. (2004). “Telenovela reception in rural Brazil: gendered readings and sexual mores.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21, 162-181.