How does local cultural production respond to global technological and environmental forces in Latin America? How do artificial intelligence, translation, and digital infrastructures transform the ways culture is written, read, and circulated in Spanish and Portuguese? These are some of the questions that inspire Dr. Raynor’s academic work.

Her scholarship explores the intersections of literature, technology, and environment across contemporary Latin America. Drawing on works from Brazil, Chile, Panama, and beyond, she examines how digital tools—from machine translation and AI text generators to social media storytelling—reshape the politics of language and authorship. She is committed to broadening the definition of cultural production to include emerging forms of creativity that reflect the realities of our interconnected, multilingual world.

Raynor argues that studying culture today requires attention to both linguistic and material practices. Data centers, cloud networks, and translation platforms are not neutral technologies but sites where questions of access, equity, and ecological impact converge. Latin America, with its history of linguistic hybridity and ecological vulnerability, offers a vital lens through which to examine these global dynamics.

Raynor currently leads two interrelated research projects. Multilingual AI in the Global South investigates how artificial intelligence and its infrastructures—such as data centers in Chile and Panama and the linguistic politics of Portuguese in Brazil—mediate cultural production, translation, and environmental relations. Toxic Futures: Cultures of the Environment in Latin America examines how literature, film, and digital media represent the entanglements of contamination, inequality, and ecological precarity in the twenty-first century. Together, these projects link digital and environmental humanities to illuminate how technological and ecological crises are represented, resisted, and reimagined across Latin American contexts.

Raynor’s research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec. Her publications have appeared in numerous edited collections along with venues such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Journal of Cultural Analytics, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, and the Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada.