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Dr. Shana MacDonald is Associate Professor in Communication Arts. Her interdisciplinary research is situated between film, media, communication, and performance studies. She studies feminist, queer, and anti-racist social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, performance, and visual culture as well as the rise of online hate, technology facilitated gender based violence, and disinformation online. 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. She is a series editor for Ohio State University Press’s Digital Feminist Resistance and on the editorial board of Women Studies Quarterly, a founding member of the Platformed Visual Misogyny International Working Group and the Visual Methods Collective (ECREA) in Europe. She has published in Feminist Media Studies, Camera Obscura, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Feminist Media Histories, and Media Theory Journal. MacDonald 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 has a forthcoming book on the aesthetics of Internet memes (Ohio State University Press, 2025). MacDonald 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.
Recent Work
“Feminist Relationality in Practice: Pedagogies of Critical Friendship and Careful Support,” co-authors Brianna Wiens and Aynur Kadir, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique (October 2023). https://www.digitalstudies.org/article/id/9572/
“Meme-ifying Data: The Rise of Public Health Influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter during Covid-19,” co-author Brianna Wiens, Journal of Digital Social Research (September 2023). https://jdsr.se/ojs/index.php/jdsr/article/view/151
“The Queer Imaginaries of Witches and Magical Beings in Feminist YA Graphic Novels,” MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture Special Issue: Embodying Feminist Discourse in Comics and Graphic Novels (2023). https://maifeminism.com/the-queer-and-feminist-worlds-of-witches-and-magical-beings/
““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.
“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
- COMMST 229 - History and Communication
- COMMST/DAC 300 - Special Topics in Digital Design
- COMMST 210 - Key Concepts in Media and Culture
- COMMST 339 – Media, Images and Communication