Dr. Shana MacDonald
Associate Professor, Communication Arts, University of Waterloo
Cultural critic on gender, feminism, digital cultures, social media, memes, film, television, popular culture, and art; media artist, teacher and scholar currently focused on COVID-19 and public communication during times of crisis
Media
Feminist Media Studies Approaches to Studying Digital Activist Meme-scapes
This was a talk by Dr Shana MacDonald, titled “Feminist Media Studies Approaches to Studying Digital Activist Meme-scapes”. The event was moderated by Idil Galip and hosted with help from the Centre for Data, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh.
Networked Feminisms Speaker Series Session 1: Conceptual Frameworks for Networked Feminism
Bringing together contributors of the book, this speaker series explores how feminists employ a variety of online platforms, practices, and tools to create spaces of solidarity and to articulate a critical politics that refuses popular forms of individual, consumerist, white feminism in favor of collective, tangible action.
This session approaches to exploring networking feminisms.
Networked Feminisms Speaker Series Session 2: Networked Digital Identities and Communities
Bringing together contributors of the book, this speaker series explores how feminists employ a variety of online platforms, practices, and tools to create spaces of solidarity and to articulate a critical politics that refuses popular forms of individual, consumerist, white feminism in favor of collective, tangible action.
This second session explores networked digital identities and communities focusing on the roles of digital counterpublics and artifacts for fostering solidarity.
Networked Feminisms Speaker Series Session 3: Digital Activism in Practice
Bringing together contributors of the book, this speaker series explores how feminists employ a variety of online platforms, practices, and tools to create spaces of solidarity and to articulate a critical politics that refuses popular forms of individual, consumerist, white feminism in favor of collective, tangible action.
This session puts themes of racial justice, intersectional feminism, South Asian digital diasporic community, and reproductive justice into conversation with each other to explore practices of digital activism.
GI Playbook Lecture: Publishing for the Humanities with Shana MacDonald
On Tues. May 26th, we hosted our first virtual lecture on Microsoft Teams by GI Faculty Member, Dr. Shana MacDonald: “GI Playbook: Publishing for the Humanities”.
Brown Bag Talk: Shana MacDonald and Bri Wiens on Creative Research Design for the Resistance
This research talk draws on new materialist and intersectional, trans, and queer feminist modes of social inquiry to situate all bodies, human and nonhuman, and affects in relations of matter and mattering. Through a discussion of three of our projects–-Reconstruction (2016), Feminists Do Media (2019–present), and Let Us Speak (2020)––we will explore how our existing research creation methodologies developed through our work with public participatory art and have shifted for digital and online spaces. We will outline how these methods help in articulating our goal to engage in work that actively intervenes into racist cisheteropatriarchal dominant structures both online and offline. Our projects are designed with the intent of co-opting the functions of the “master’s tools” (Audre Lorde 1984) via decidedly aesthetic modes of exploratory knowledge production that do not have predetermined, tangible deliverables––what we call a feminist hack. Ultimately, we argue that creative "intra-actions" (Karen Barad 2003) in (non)mediated spaces produce knowledges that need to be more carefully and critically taken up in both the academy and industry. We demonstrate how we do this through deploying social media networks as spaces of critical intervention and resistance.
COM 2020 Session 3B - How Generation Z Is Using Social Media During the Pandemic - Shana MacDonald
Recorded session from the Conference on Communications in Health Care Settings.
How Generation Z Is Using Social Media During the Pandemic
We are currently living through the first pandemic to take place during the digital era. As most of our social and work lives have had to transition online, and information is now predominantly filtered through screens, we are facing what Dr. MacDonald refers to as an “infodemic”.
The session will focus on how social media is being taken up by younger users – what has worked, what hasn’t, what is needed? Are memes and TikTok keys to reaching the attention of the younger demographic?
For more info: visit https://sparkconferences.com/communic...
Social Media Messaging and Public Officials
CTV Toronto, October 26, 2020Television
Interview with Rahim Ladhani
Concerns of a rise in online predators during COVID
CTV, April 8, 2020Television
URL: https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/video?&binId=1.1147281
Interview with Natalie Van Rooy for CTV Kitchener News at Six on UN's warning of increased cyber predators and how to help kids stay safe online.
“Ontario government launches learn-at-home website as millions of students stay home,”
CTV, March 20, 2020Television
On air and digital interview segments
640 Toronto Radio with Alan Carter, April 11, 2022Radio/Podcast
URL: https://omny.fm/shows/alan-carter/we-need-stability-direction-how-lack-of-messaging
We need stability & direction': How lack of messaging from Ontario's top doctor hurt us in the 6th wave
VIEWS from Venus with Mary Churchill, December 9, 2021Radio/Podcast
Creating Space in Academia with Shana MacDonald
Beyond the Bulletin, April 16, 2021Radio/Podcast
Episode 84: Communicating in a Crisis
The Morning Show with Mike Stafford, April 9, 2021Radio/Podcast
URL: https://omny.fm/shows/am640-the-morning-show/why-were-tuning-out-covid-19-messaging-as-the-pand
Why we're tuning out COVID-19 messaging as the pandemic drags on
570 News, April 7, 2021Radio/Podcast
URL: https://www.570news.com/audio/the-mike-farwell-show/
What's in a name? Experts confused by terms like lockdown, shutdown, circuit breakers
Interview from 88:38 - 96:05
Global News with Rachel D'Amore, October 1, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://globalnews.ca/news/7368544/coronavirus-canada-youth-social-media/
Why Social Media is a ‘missed opportunity’ as coronavirus spreads among young people
The Scott Thompson Show, CHML 900, October 1, 2020Radio/Podcast
How to reach youth demographic with Covid Messaging
The Morning Show with Devon Peacock, 980 CFPL , October 2, 2020Radio/Podcast
Social Media and Covid messaging
CTV News with Melissa Couto Zuber, October 9, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/can-virtual-thanksgiving-dinners-be-meaningful-experts-say-we
Can virtual Thanksgiving dinners be meaningful? Experts say we can adapt traditions
Spice Radio Vancouver, January 13, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://soundcloud.com/user-244969524-696484203/shana-macdonald-jan-31
The Mike Farwell Show, 570 News, June 5, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://www.570news.com/audio/the-mike-farwell-show/
How to Spot Fake News
The Scott Thompson Show, October 9, 2020Radio/Podcast
Thanksgiving virtual diners during a pandemic
Beyond the Daily Bulletin
University of Waterloo, April 17, 2020Radio/Podcast
Discussing staying connected during COVID-19. Interview starts at 9:25 min.
Spice Podcast, January 31, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://soundcloud.com/user-244969524-696484203/shana-macdonald-jan-31
Interview on Harry and Megan leaving the UK and Royal Family
unhinged
Feminists Do Media/qCollaborative, January 15, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: http://unhinged.libsyn.com/website
The UNHINGED feminist podcast seeks to take the hinges off the doors of media technologies and create holes in those walls to walk on through. We’re working at the intersections of intersectional, queer, and trans feminisms to take up the current state of media technologies.
Current technologies and digital cultures are overflowing with forms of misogyny that promote intimidation, harassment, and shocking amounts of violence online. Under these conditions, feminists working online are challenging gender discrimination and promoting renewed visions of feminist politics in the public sphere. In this podcast, we think through “Digital Feminism” as an important site for what feminists can offer, as well as the exclusions that can happen under the fourth-wave feminist banner. This podcast thinks through how to co-opt the functions of technologies via an interventionist mode of exploratory knowledge production that does not have a predetermined, tangible deliverable––a feminist design hack. We’re taking on all the media we love, and all the media we love to critique.
Interview with Shana MacDonald / Feminist Think Tank and Instagram Research, Activism, and Education
Teachin’ Books, November 16, 2021Online
Accountability despite anonymity: Finding ways to combat online trolling
The Charlatan with Nehaa Bimal, August 7, 2021Online
Provaccination businesses in Waterloo Region attacked on social media
The Record with Catherine Thompson, July 22, 2021Online
‘It didn’t have to be this way’: Ontario lockdown message muddled
The Waterloo Chronicle with Mike Farwell, April 17, 2021Online
What's in a name? Experts confused by terms like lockdown, shutdown, circuit breakers
CTV News with Melissa Couto Zuber, April 2, 2021Online
Communicating in a Crisis
Beyond the Bulletin, April 16, 2021Online
When health messages sound like Klingon, people tune out
The Globe And Mail with Elizabeth Renzetti, April 8, 2021Online
How social media helped COVID-19 experts become household names during pandemic
CTV News with with Melissa Couto Zuber, March 16, 2021Online
Can you be in love with love itself?
A Love of One's Own with Jessica Mazze, February 10, 2021Online
URL: https://aloveofonesown.theeyeopener.com/in-love-with-romance
Pandemic, Politics and Polarization
The Community Edition with Melissa Embury, February 4, 2021Online
URL: https://communityedition.ca/pandemic-politics-and-polarization/
Fact or Fiction: Does Trump’s social media ban threaten our freedom of expression?
Global News with Noor Ibrahim, January 21, 2021Online
URL: https://globalnews.ca/news/7589161/fact-or-fiction-trump-ban-freedom-of-expression/
Let's laud Harry and Meghan for their act of self-care -- and then leave them alone
The Conversation, January 22, 2020Online
Ontario government launches learn-at-home website as millions of students stay home
CTV Kitchener, March 20, 2020Online
UW Student Creates Video Game To Fight Covid
Waterloo Record, August 10, 2020Online
Interview with Tasmin Chu
‘Inappropriate’ but not illegal: Why women Tony Clement followed online are going public
Global News, November 9, 2018Online
URL: https://globalnews.ca/news/4646287/tony-clement-instagram-women/
'Instagram therapy' is on the rise, but experts say it could be harmful
Global News, October 10, 2019Online
URL: https://globalnews.ca/news/5985383/social-media-therapy/
Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies
by Brianna Wiens, Shana MacDonald, Michelle MacArthur, Milena Radzikowska
Lexington Press
Forthcoming, 2022
Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context (3rd Edition)
by Paul Long, Beth Johnson, Shana MacDonald, Schem Rogerson Bader, Tim Wall
Routledge
August 23, 2021
9781138914407
This thoroughly revised and updated third edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the various approaches to the field, explaining why media messages matter, how media businesses prosper and why media is integral to defining contemporary life.
The text is divided into three parts – Media texts and meanings; Producing media; and Media and social contexts – exploring the ways in which various media forms make meaning; are produced and regulated; and how society, culture and history are defined by such forms. Encouraging students to actively engage in media research and analysis, each chapter seeks to guide readers through key questions and ideas in order to empower them to develop their own scholarship, expertise and investigations of the media worlds in which we live. Fully updated to reflect the contemporary media environment, the third edition includes new case studies covering topics such as Brexit, podcasts, Love Island, Captain Marvel, Black Lives Matter, Netflix, data politics, the Kardashians, President Trump, ‘fake news’, the post-Covid world and perspectives on global media forms.
This is an essential introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media and popular culture.
Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices
by Shana MacDonald, Milena Radzikowska, Michelle MacArthur, Brianna Wiens
Lexington Press
February 6, 2021
This book seeks to consider how digital feminist activism uses conventions of assembly, performativity, theatricality, and design to counter the individualizing forces of postfeminism and neoliberalism while foregrounding the types of systemic change so greatly needed, but often overlooked, in this climate. This book seeks to gather provocations, analyses, creative explorations, and/or cases studies of digital feminist practices from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives including, but not limited to, media studies, communication studies, critical and cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, digital humanities, feminist HCI, and feminist STS. The collection has submissions from leading experts in feminist media studies and will make a significant contribution to this area of research.
The Queer Imaginaries of Witches and Magical Beings in Feminist YA Graphic Novels
by Shana MacDonald
Published by MAI: Feminism and Visual Culutre Special Issue: Embodying Feminist Discourse in Comics and Graphic Novels
Forthcoming 2023
“All Your Faves Are Problematic”: The Performative Spectatorship of Drunk Feminist Films
by Shana MacDonald
Published by Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies
In Press, 2022
Living whose best life? An intersectional feminist interrogation of postfeminist #solidarity in #selfcare
by Brianna Wiens and Shana MacDonald
Published by NECSUS: European Journal of Media
June 5, 2021
In this article, we compare some of the different types of feminist ethos made visible by Instagram and #selfcare. Specifically, we examine the largely white, postfeminist enactments of #selfcare alongside uses of the hashtag by Black and racialised accounts to highlight how the hashtag both largely fails to offer forms of self-care that explicitly address societal inequities, but also opens up spaces of possibility for the articulation of a feminist politics antithetical to that of postfeminism.
The Aesthetic Lives of Performers: Rethinking Intermediality in the Films of Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann
by Shana MacDonald
Published by Cinéma&Cie
March 1, 2020
This article reads together the work of Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann, as situated between film, performance, as well as dance and painting, considering what their work reveals about a specific intermedial feminist aesthetics developing at this time. It argues these traits in their work are not isolated commonalities but are shared with a wide range of feminist artists working in the 1960s and 1970s and are still echoed in contemporary feminist art.
URL: https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/view/16170
Feminist futures: #MeToo’s possibilities as poiesis, techné, and pharmakon
by Brianna I. Wiens and Shana MacDonald
Published by Feminist Media Studies
This article is about the possibilities and constraints of MeToo acitivism.
What Do You (Really) Meme? Pandemic Memes as Social Political Repositories
by Shana MacDonald
Published by Leisure Sciences Special Issue: Leisure in the time of coronavirus
June 24, 2020
The commentary examines coronavirus memes circulating around forms of generational conflict that have risen from experiences of self-isolation. Employing participant-observation methods within online spaces of meme circulation, the commentary analyzes the political, social, and affective aspects of the memes considered.
'Mobilizing the ‘Multi-Mangle’: Why New Materialist Research Methods in Public Participatory Art Matter
by Shana MacDonald and Brianna I Wiens
Published by Leisure Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal
July 17, 2019
This research study is focused on new materialist modes of social inquiry and in particular the material-discursive practices that situate all bodies, human and nonhuman, in relations of matter and mattering. The present study investigates the work of the Mobile Art Studio (MAS), a transitory creative research lab that brings participatory art into pub-lic space to develop greater community engagement with issues of social justice.
Reimaging Public Space in Expanded Cinema Exhibition
by Shana MacDonald
Published by Canadian Journal of Film Studies
October 1, 2018
This article looks at the increased presence of expanded cinema screens in contemporary site-specific, large-scale public art exhibitions in Canada. My analysis of recent work by Julie Nagam, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Lacie Kanerahtahsóhon Burning examines how expanded cinema can situate viewers as embodied witnesses to complex iterations of time and space. This reading considers how these examples of expanded cinema, within the context of site-specific public art exhibitions, work to advance a curatorial emphasis on aesthetic forms of reimagining.
The Psychogeographies of Site-Specific Art
by Shana Macdonald
Published by Media Theory Journal 1.2
June 6, 2018
This paper examines the types of geospatial memory produced and inscribed through small-scale, participatory, site-specific urban art events. It considers how this work participates in forms of placemaking which both enact provisional and iterative forms of assembly while also marking the psychogeographic remains of space.
Pop-Up Art and the Aesthetics of Assembly
by Shana MacDonald
Published by Canadian Theatre Review, UofT Press
September 1, 2018
This article considers the phenomenon of pop-up practice as a medium of public art and collective assembly. I argue for the pedagogical potential of the research-creation pop-up to situate aesthetic contributions as relevant and necessary to broader public discourse. Discussing a series of case studies developed through the Mobile Art Studio, a transitory creative lab space that I founded in 2014, I consider how the pop-up becomes the vehicle for brief, carnivalesque transformations of institutional settings toward critical ends. The pop-up’s performative assemblies open up provisional and contingent understandings between audiences, artists, and participants. What remains from them is the memory of a lived, embodied experience of knowledge production and translation outside traditional institutional confines.
Refusing to Smile for the Patriarchy: Jessica Jones as Feminist Killjoy
by Shana MacDonald
Published by Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
This article considers how season one of Netflix’s Jessica Jones functions as a feminist revenge narrative that situates the titular protagonist as a survivor of patriarchal abuses at the hands of her ex-boyfriend and supervillain Kilgrave. The article explores how Jessica embodies Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist killjoy. Jessica is a feminist anti-hero who provides an alternative, angry, superhumanly strong avatar of women’s everyday negotiations with misogynist excesses. The article reads her as a flawed character who importantly fails the perfectionism tied to postfeminist and neoliberal requirement of contemporary women. This makes her both sympathetic and resonant in the current moment of feminism. As both a symbolic figure and a site of catharsis, the article considers Jones’ journey to greater forms of agency in her fight against Kilgrave.
Biography
Shana MacDonald's research examines contemporary and historical feminisms across social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, performance, and public art. MacDonald is the PI for SSHRC funded Insight Development Grant 'The Personal is Aesthetic: The Formal Politics of Feminist Film and Media" (2018-2020). MacDonald is also an internationally curated artist who explores the community-building potential of creative practice through her work with the qcollaborative (www.qcollaborative.com), a feminist design lab dedicated to developing new forms of relationality through digital technologies and public performance. She is currently running a campus-wide initiative to amplify stories of student's lived experiences a Gender Equity Grant under the HeforShe Impact 10x10x10 program at the University of Waterloo.
https://www.feminist-think-tank.com/
Additional Titles and Affiliations
Feminists Do Media
Social media campaign aiming to amplify marginalized voices by intervening into dominant media spaces. We post regularly on both historical and contemporary media makers, activists, and all things feminist. We advance an intersectional, queer, and trans feminist position that both speaks to and reflects our campaign content creators and our audience. Find us on Instagram (@aesthetic.resistance)
qCollaborative
Intersectional feminist design research lab committed to advancing equity and social justice through the intersections of technology and performance in public practice.
www.qcollaborative.com
Research Grants
Connect, Collaborate, and Tailor: Multimedia tools to Promote Vaccine Confidence. Funded
Organization: NSERC Encouraging Vaccine Confidence in Canada GrantGrant amount: 50,000
Details:
More information: https://uwaterloo.ca/pharmacy/news/multidisciplinary-team-receives-federal-contribution-build
Everything Old is New Again: A Comparative Analysis of Feminist Media Tactics between the 2nd- to 4th Waves
Organization: Archives Unleashed Cohorts Program 2021Date: June 1, 2022
Grant amount: 15,000
Feminist Digital Media (2016-2020): Building Affective and Activist Worlds
Organization: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC Inside Grant)Grant amount: 213,259
Details:
2016-2020
The Space Between Us: Col(lab)orations Within Indigenous, Circumpolar and Pacific Places Through Digital Media and Design
Organization: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC Partnership Grant)Grant amount: 2,500,000
Details:
PI Julie Nagam (2021)
Design for Peace (Tumaco) Exhibition and Workshop
Organization: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC Connection)Grant amount: $45,866
Details:
2019
Insight Development Grant
Organization: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)Date: July 1, 2018
Grant amount: 47,000
Details:
Dr. MacDonald is the Principle Investigator of the “The Personal is Aesthetic: The Formal Politics of Feminist Film and Media" funded by SSHRC between 2018 and 2020. The project maps feminist media practices between the 1960s and the present (2018-2020).
Through the project Dr. MacDonald has developed “Feminists Do Media” social media campaign, archiving and circulating feminist media practices that amplify marginalized, intersectional feminist lived experiences and histories to a broad public which can be found on Instagram (@aesthetic.resistance).
Gender Equity Grant
Organization: HeforShe Impact 10x10x10 / University of WaterlooDate: September 1, 2017
Grant amount: $10,000
Details:
Funding for the upcoming project "Let Her Speak" which gives women-identified University of Waterloo students access to public platforms for outlining their intersectional experiences of their learning environments through spoken word, video, performance and social media campaigns.
More information: https://uwaterloo.ca/heforshe/blog/post/research-matters-especially-gender-equity-research