How do languages and cultures acquire relevance within global systems that were not designed around them? How do communities respond to technological, ecological, and political transformations originating beyond their borders—and create alternative worlds from within them? These questions guide Dr. Raynor’s research across Latin American cultural studies, digital humanities, environmental humanities, and multilingual artificial intelligence.

Raynor’s scholarship examines how global forces are translated, contested, and reimagined through local cultural production. Drawing on literature, film, digital media, and technological infrastructures from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Panama, and beyond, she explores how storytelling responds to globalization, migration, environmental change, and technological innovation. Her work expands conventional understandings of literary and cultural production by attending to digital, multimedia, multilingual, and transnational forms of expression.

A central concern of Raynor’s research is the material and ethical character of technology. She approaches digital platforms, language models, data infrastructures, and media systems not as neutral tools but as cultural infrastructures that shape whose languages, histories, and knowledge become visible and consequential. Her work considers how questions of linguistic diversity, translation, access, labor, extraction, and ecological impact intersect—and how perspectives from Latin America and the Global South can transform wider conversations about technology and culture.

Her current book project, AI Beyond English: Language, Sovereignty, and New Geographies of Intelligence, investigates the emergence of regional and multilingual language models outside the traditional Anglophone technosphere. It asks how communities are developing AI systems that respond to their own languages, cultural priorities, and forms of knowledge, and how these initiatives are creating new centres of technological relevance and influence. The project brings together research on translation technologies, data sovereignty, Indigenous and underrepresented languages, and the material infrastructures of AI, including data centers and the extraction of critical minerals across the Global South. Rather than treating multilingual models simply as localized versions of global technologies, Raynor examines them as cultural projects capable of generating alternative technological imaginaries and new ways of organizing knowledge.

Her adjacent project, Toxic Futures: Cultures of Contamination in Contemporary Latin America, examines how literature, film, and digital media represent environmental degradation, structural violence, extraction, and uneven exposure to risk. Together, these projects connect digital humanities, environmental humanities, and comparative cultural studies to investigate the worlds produced by technological and ecological transformation—and the ways communities negotiate, contest, and reimagine their place within them.

Raynor is the author of Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces and co-editor of Digital Encounters: Envisioning Connectivity in Latin American Cultural Production. Her co-edited volume, Beyond Border Crises: New Forms of Migration in Contemporary Latin American Culture, is currently in advanced preparation. Her work has appeared in journals and edited collections including Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal of Cultural Analytics, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, and Portuguese Studies Review. Her research has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec, and the Fulbright Program.