Utopic Refusals: 21st Century Feminist Digital Visual Cultures
Apr 20, 2023 — All day
In collaboration with the office of the Vice-Dean of Research of the Faculty of Arts, we are pleased to present the Digital Cultures Lecture series. This year-long series will introduce cutting-edge research and initiatives in digital scholarship.
This Lecture will be offered in a hybrid format, join us in Simard Hall, room 125 or on Zoom.
This event will be exclusively offered in English.
Digital Cultures Lecture Series
This talk explores the ebbs and flows of feminism in the 21st century with particular attention to visual culture of digital media in the last decade. As the title indicates, the recent decade of fourth-wave feminism is best characterized as a networked series of utopic refusals. This talk considers what the visual culture found in film and television, as well as memes, viral videos and protest posters, can tell us about this decade of tumultuous resistance. Most significantly, the talk considers the seeds that have been planted within these ephemera for more equitable futures and how we can take these as a blueprint for our ongoing work in the present.
Shana MacDonald
Associate professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo
Shana MacDonald is an associate professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo.
Her SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary research examines feminist, queer, and anti-racist media activisms within social and digital media, memes, popular culture, cinema, and contemporary art. She co-runs the online archive Feminists Do Media and co-directs the Feminist Think Tank housed at the Games Institute. She has published in Feminist Media Studies (2020), Camera Obscura (2022), MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture (forthcoming), and is lead co-editor of Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices (2022) and co-editor of Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies (2023).