Shana MacDonald

Associate Professor

shana.macdonald@uwaterloo.ca Professor Shana MacDonald
(519) 888-4567 x 45157

Dr. Shana MacDonald is Associate Professor in Communication Arts. Her grant funded interdisciplinary research is situated between film, media, communication, and performance studies, and examines intersectional feminism within social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, performance, and public art. Dr. MacDonald currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant (2020-2025), co-runs the online archive Feminists Do Media (Instagram: @aesthetic.resistance), and co-directs the Feminist Think Tank, housed at the Games Institute at UW.  She has published in Feminist Media Studies, Camera Obscura, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Feminist Media Histories, and Media Theory Journal. She is lead editor of Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices (2022) and a co-editor of Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies (2023). She is past-President of the Film and Media Association of Canada (2020-2022) and holds a PhD in Communication and Culture (2013), an MA in Cinema and Media Studies (2005) from York University, and a BFA in Image Arts (2001) from Ryerson University. Follow Dr. MacDonald's research on Instagram @aesthetic.resistance or on Twitter @shanamacPS

Stories of feminist protest and resistance book cover

Recent Work

Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies. edited by Brianna Wiens, Shana MacDonald, Michelle MacArthur, Milena Radzikowska. (Lexington Press, 2023).

Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices, edited by Shana MacDonald, Milena Radzikowska, Michelle MacArthur, Brianna I Wiens (Lexington Press, 2021).

““All Your Faves Are Problematic”: The Performative Spectatorship of Drunk Feminist Films,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies (2022) 37 (2 (110)): 149–159. 

“Flipping the Script on Consent: Re-centering Young Women’s Sexual Agency in Teen Comedies” in Screening #MeToo:Rape Culture in Hollywood Film, edited by Lisa Funnell and Ralph Beliveau (SUNY Press, 2022). 

“Feminist Memes: Digital Communities, Identity Performance, and Resistance from the Shadows” co-author, Brianna Wiens for Materializing Digital Futures: Touch, Movement, Sound and Vision ed. Toija Cinque (Bloomsbury, 2022).

“Living whose best life? An intersectional feminist interrogation of postfeminist #solidarity in #selfcare” co-author Brianna I. Wiens, NECSUS: European Journal of Media (June 2021). 

Courses taught
  • SPCOM 210 - Key Concepts in Media and Culture
  • SPCOM 339 – Media, Images and Communication
  • SPCOM 101 – Theories of Communication
  • ARTS 130 - What Do You Meme?
Affiliation: 
University of Waterloo

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