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
Social Media Messaging and Public Officials
CTV Toronto, October 26, 2020Television
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
The Morning Show, April 9, 2021Radio/Podcast
URL: https://omny.fm/shows/am640-the-morning-show/why-were-tuning-out-covid-19-messaging-as-the-pand
570 News, April 7, 2021Radio/Podcast
URL: https://www.570news.com/audio/the-mike-farwell-show/
Interview from 88:38 - 96:05
CTV Kitchener, March 20, 2020Radio/Podcast
Waterloo Record, August 10, 2020Radio/Podcast
Global News, October 1, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://globalnews.ca/news/7368544/coronavirus-canada-youth-social-media/
The Scott Thompson Show, CHML 900, October 1, 2020Radio/Podcast
The Morning Show with Devon Peacock, 980 CFPL , October 2, 2020Radio/Podcast
CTV News, October 9, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/can-virtual-thanksgiving-dinners-be-meaningful-experts-say-we
Spice Radio Vancouver, January 13, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://soundcloud.com/user-244969524-696484203/shana-macdonald-jan-31
CTV Kitchener, April 8, 2020Radio/Podcast
Beyond the Daily Bulletin #40, April 17, 2020Radio/Podcast
The Mike Farwell Show, 570 News, June 5, 2020Radio/Podcast
The Scott Thompson Show, October 9, 2020Radio/Podcast
Beyond the Daily Bulletin
University of Waterloo, April 17, 2020Radio/Podcast
Discussing staying connected during COVID-19. Interview starts at 9:25 min.
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.
Fact or Fiction: Does Trump’s social media ban threaten our freedom of expression?
Global News, January 21, 2021Print
URL: https://globalnews.ca/news/7589161/fact-or-fiction-trump-ban-freedom-of-expression/
Communicating in a Crisis
Beyond the Bulletin, April 16, 2021Online
When health messages sound like Klingon, people tune out
How social media helped COVID-19 experts become household names during pandemic
Can you be in love with love itself?
A Love of One's Own, February 10, 2021Online
URL: https://aloveofonesown.theeyeopener.com/in-love-with-romance
Pandemic, Politics and Polarization
The Community Edition, 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, January 21, 2021Online
URL: https://globalnews.ca/news/7589161/fact-or-fiction-trump-ban-freedom-of-expression/
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/
Let's laud Harry and Meghan for their act of self-care -- and then leave them alone
The Conversation, January 22, 2020Online
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/
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
Let's laud Harry and Meghan for their act of self-care -- and then leave them alone
The Conversation, January 22, 2020Online
Analysis published in The Conversation regarding the sexist and racist treatment of Meghan Markle by both the public and the press.
‘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/
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.
Vital acts of transfer: Affective economies and embodied knowledge in #MeToo
by Shana MacDonald
Published by Intellect Books
December 4, 2020
Forthcoming essay in Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away, edited by Judith Rudakoff for Intellect Books.
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.
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
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