She was involved in a student activist group called DePaul Students Against the War. Professors Makagon and Willard, she says, "opened my eyes that communication studies could be this space where I could think about social change through a lens that just felt more flexible and more comfortable than some of the other disciplines that I had been taking classes in."ĭePaul also nurtured her social and civic life in ways that still resonate with her today. Jolie feels that her political and activist education was nurtured alongside her more traditional academic education at DePaul. "Teaching and writing have always been the focus since about my senior year of college." "I remember very vividly thinking that when you’re a professor, you get to kind of do social justice work through teaching, but you also get to write," she says. Once in the program, Jolie became excited about the possibilities of a career in academia. Her faculty mentors in the College of Communication, Dan Makagon and Barb Willard, helped her apply very late for the college’s master’s program. She recalls her internship at a nonprofit during her senior year: "It was a great place, but I realized that sort of 9-to-5 life really was not for me." This unorthodox position in higher education suits Jolie’s preference for a varied and flexible career-a preference she discovered at DePaul. She is now the Making Media, Making Change program director with the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA), a nonprofit that offers community-based, experiential-learning classes with a social justice bent to students across Minnesota. Jolie is referring to the writing she does as part of her "day job." Since earning her PhD in communication studies, Jolie has pursued an academic career that has taken her to teaching positions at Merrimack College, Tufts University and Normandale Community College. Creative writing has always been my passion, so it was really enjoyable to get back to a style of writing that wasn’t strictly academic." Jolie recalls that despite recounting some of the toughest times of her life, writing the book was a "mostly enjoyable process. Belt Publishing, which published the book, describes it as a story of how "rural Ohio poverty and alternative ’90s culture made Raechel into who she is today: a queer femme with PTSD and a deep love of the Midwest." So I was really honored and excited," she says. "The book was put out from a small press that doesn’t often get attention from big media outlets like that. Shocked." That’s how Raechel Anne Jolie (CMN ’07, MA ’09) described her reaction to learning that her memoir, "Rust Belt Femme" had made NPR’s list of the best biographies and memoirs of 2020.
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