Browsing by Author "MacDonald, Shana"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Assemblies of Resistance: Feminist Stories, Protest, and Dissent in the Digital Age
(Lexington Books, 2023-02-15) Wiens, Brianna I.; MacArthur, Michelle; MacDonald, Shana
Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies foregrounds the importance of storytelling for coalition building, solidarity, and performative assembly. Bringing together scholars and activists from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, this book offers creative explorations, analyses, personal stories, and case studies of digital feminist activism that speak directly to the many ways that feminist communities assemble for the purposes of protest and resistance. Through various forms of feminist media mobilizations, from hashtag feminism and platform activism to personal blogs and meme accounts, these chapters explore how digital feminists use the long-standing tactics of storytelling to counter the dominant narratives of white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and the intersecting oppressions that accompany such structures, both online and offline. By sharing stories of intersectional feminist assembly for collective justice, this book contributes to larger conversations about establishing alternative ways of seeing and being in the world, inviting others to assemble with us.
Dwelling as Method: Lingering in/with Feminist Curated Data Sets on Instagram
(DIGSUM, 2024) Wiens, Brianna I.; MacDonald, Shana
This article proposes and delineates “digital dwelling” as one method of grappling with a central methodological challenge that we, as feminist researchers, face of how researchers might account for the multiple entanglements of affect, history, culture, politics, and resistance within feminist digital media artifacts. Using our method of digital dwelling, we analyze three sets of carousel posts on Instagram from three different accounts: Intersectional Environmentalist Collective, For the Wild, and Richa Kaul Padte. We explore how the inter, para, and meta-textual arguments curated through these carousel posts change the ways audiences relate to one another and to the current political moment, and how audiences, including individual researchers, are situated in affective and embodied ways within the research scene. By demarcating small, embodied data curation as a key space of method and analysis, we suggest that the personal relationships we develop in community as researchers with located acts of transgression, like these posts, are significant to consider more fully through their emergent intertextualities, especially for those invested in contemporary social media, protest, and visual cultures.
Feminist Shadow Networks: 'Thinking, Talking, and Making' as Praxes of Relationality and Care
(Open Library of Humanities, 2023-10-17) Wiens, Brianna I.; MacDonald, Shana; Kadir, Aynur
In the face of the constraints and pressures of the neoliberal university, this article argues for the importance of feminist shadow networks as a response to the unequal academic grounds on which scholars and students are asked to situate themselves. Calling for such networks as a model of relationality, we suggest that critical friendship and careful support are necessary for addressing the exacerbated correlating class-, race-, and gender-based inequities that continue to haunt us. We outline three praxes of “think, talk, and make” that we, the Feminist Think Tank, a research-creation collective that advances work on feminist media, art, and design, rely on in our feminist shadow work. In the section on THINKING, we offer the guiding orientations to our work that are grounded in epistemologies of un-learning, feminist relationality, and critical friendship. Next, in TALKING, we discuss our approaches to collaboration, analysis, and community, which are nested within epistemologies of careful support and trust. Last, in MAKING, we outline recent projects that Feminist Think Tank has undertaken, offering examples of how we create our own digital feminist interventions from the space of the feminist shadow network. Overall, this work contributes to more careful and critical approaches to research, data, technological affordances, and feminist histories via our feminist shadow networks, offering alternative stories and ways of being in the academy. Face aux contraintes et aux pressions de l'université néolibérale, cet article défend l'importance des réseaux fantômes féministes comme réponse aux inégalités académiques sur lesquelles les chercheurs et les étudiants sont invités à se situer. En appelant à de tels réseaux comme modèle de relationnalité, nous suggérons qu'une amitié critique et un soutien attentif sont nécessaires pour aborder les inégalités exacerbées et corrélées basées sur la classe, la race et le genre qui continuent à nous hanter. Nous décrivons trois pratiques de "penser, parler et faire" sur lesquelles nous, The Feminist Think Tank, un collectif de recherche-création qui fait avancer le travail sur les médias, l'art et le design féministes, nous appuyons dans notre travail de l'ombre féministe. Dans la section PENSER, nous présentons les orientations qui guident notre travail et qui sont fondées sur les épistémologies du désapprentissage, de la relationnalité féministe et de l'amitié critique. Ensuite, dans la section PARLER, nous discutons de nos approches de la collaboration, de l'analyse et de la communauté, qui s'inscrivent dans des épistémologies de soutien attentif et de confiance. Enfin, dans MAKING, nous décrivons les projets récents entrepris par The Feminist Think Tank, en offrant des exemples de la manière dont nous créons nos propres interventions féministes numériques à partir de l'espace du réseau fantôme féministe. Dans l'ensemble, ce travail contribue à des approches plus prudentes et critiques de la recherche, des données, des possibilités technologiques et des histoires féministes par le biais de nos réseaux fantômes féministes, offrant des histoires et des manières alternatives d'être dans le monde académique.
Materializing Data: New Research Methods for Feminist Digital Humanities
(Open Library of Humanities, 2020-11-24) Wiens, Brianna I.; Ruecker, Stan; Roberts-Smith, Jennifer; Radzikowska, Milena; MacDonald, Shana
This paper argues that materializing data may be a useful methodology in intersectional feminst digital humanities, because it requires close attention not only to the content of data and the contexts in which it is produced, but also to the individual, situated, differing knowledges that researchers leverage in the processes of generating, analyzing, and disseminating research data. We introduce two approaches to data materialization currently used at the qCollaborative, an intersectional feminist design research lab with nodes at the University of Waterloo, Mount Royal University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The outcomes of these methods, which we call “forcing connections between the digital and the material” and “dwelling with embodied data in research scenes”, have included productive opportunities to: relax behavioural expectations and inhibitions; leverage tacit as well as explicit knowledges; engage in processes of vulnerable co-creation; engage in equitable co-creation of knowledge across differences in lived experience; cycle through stages of public representation, gathering, and presentation; account for the complex events, actions, and contestations that influence our processes of data-production, analysis, and remediation; generate research products that can become future research scenes for equitable data-dwelling processes; and leverage old-media tactics to intervene into harmful, normative digital cultures; and generate new conceptual paradigms; and: make explicit interventions into institutional cultures. These outcomes suggest the need for further work to develop a validated, transferable data materialization methodology for use by qCollaborative and and other digital humanities researchers.