Senior Lecturer of Political Science
She/ Her/ Hers
Rachel Meade is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science. She has a particular interest in understanding the causes of rising distrust of mainstream politicians and politics and support for populist political movements, leaders, and media sources in the US, Argentina, and globally. Her 2019 article, “Populist Narratives from Below: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party,” argues that left and right populists share common concerns about media and party elites, while left populists have a more pluralistic conception of “the people.” She draws on interviews from US and Argentine social movement members for “Populism from the Bottom Up: Ethnography from Trump’s US and Kirchner’s Argentina,” published in Routledge’s Mapping Populism. The chapter compares the political practices of a Michigan Tea Party group and the pro-Kirchner leftist social movement La Campora in Buenos Aires, finding that members engaged in similar sets of political practices which create transgressive social identities.
She is currently working on a research project that explores the ideology and impacts of alternative populist media podcasts and YouTube shows, such as the show Breaking Points. She has written about that research as it relates to the 2019 Trump campaign and RFK Jr. for The Conversation. She has previously written about the populist identities of those in the anti-covid shutdown movement for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage.
She primarily teaches courses in US politics, including seminars on Social Movements and Identity Politics, and 300-level courses on Gender and Politics, Public Opinion, and Media and Politics. She also teaches a seminar on US and Comparative Populism. As an educator, she is passionate about teaching students how to contribute to research by developing strong research puzzles, revising their writing, and develop good civic habits to navigate a complicated information environment. She recently coauthored an article with fellow BU political scientist Marcus Walton in Perspectives on Politics, “Theory Reconstruction: An Approach to Conceptual Innovation in Political Science,” which outlines a methodology that political scientists can use to “reconstruct” outdated theories in the discipline and contribute to broadening out theory development in the discipline beyond its parochial US—centric roots.
Prior to joining BU in 2020, Rachel taught courses in American Politics and worked as a Fellowships Advisor at Brown University, where she also received her Ph.D. in American and Comparative Politics in 2019. She earned her B.A. in History and Latin American Studies from Bard College in 2010.