Shana MacDonald and Bri Wiens present a new feminist & digital activism research creation methodology
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.
Hosted by the Games Institute