Brianna I. Wiens | English Language and Literature

PhD, York University
MA, University of Colorado Boulder
BA, University of Waterloo

Email: biwiens@uwaterloo.ca
Extension: 41284

Website: https://www.feminist-think-tank.com/

Biography

My research program examines how people use media in critical and creative ways to foster community and speak back to power, and I explore how we build community through digital technology while negotiating its complex power dimensions. Since my MA (Communication: Rhetoric and Culture, CU Boulder) and my PhD (Communication and Culture, York University), I’ve been interested in the ways that people engage in rhetorical resistance by speaking back to systems in power, and the ways that these rhetorics offer critical sources of data that form the basis of community-centred change. My MA explored mediations of activist graffiti and the politics of their aesthetics on social media, while my doctoral work was dedicated to developing a theoretical framework (what I called intersectional entanglements) for grappling with the complexities of online phenomena, like digital social movements, through the example of #MeToo. These experiences directly inform my overarching research goals, which are to: (1) highlight equitable alternatives to normative media practices; (2) amplify the work of racialized, queer, disabled, and other equity-deserving groups; and (3) embrace multiple forms of expertise, knowledge, and lived experience.

To work towards these research goals, I work at the intersections of digital culture, rhetoric, and feminist media studies. Across these fields, I leverage queer and intersectional feminist perspectives to examine the rhetorics, politics, and design of technologies and digital artifacts, and I ask questions about power at individual, community, and structural levels. My commitment to academia is also a commitment to political mobilizing and to scholarly activism—a constant feminist reminder that the personal (as well as community and structural) is political. Because of this, my interdisciplinary work inevitably draws on my own experience as a mixed-race queer activist-scholar. Alongside my colleague and co-conspirator, Dr. Shana MacDonald, I am the Co-Director of the Feminist Think Tank, a research-creation collective that advances research on feminist media, art, and design, out of which we co-run the digital archive Feminists Do Media (Instagram: @aesthetic.resistance).

Selected Publications

Edited Books

Wiens, Brianna I., Shana MacDonald, Michelle MacArthur, and Milena Radzikowska (eds.). 2023. Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

MacDonald, Shana, Brianna I. Wiens, Michelle MacArthur, and Milena Radzikowska (eds.). 2021. Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Fellowships and Awards

PI, UW/SSHRC Explore Seed Grant, University of Waterloo, 2023
PI, UW Games Institute Seed Grant, 2022
Provost Scholarship for Outstanding Doctoral Research (2020–2021)
SSHRC Doctoral Award (2020–2021)
Communication & Media Studies Emerging Scholar Award (2020)
Volkswagenstiftung Foundation Grant (2020)
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Doctoral (2018–2020)
Doctoral Graduate Fellowship (2016–2020)

Current Research

My current work investigates the visual culture and rhetorical vernaculars of misogyny (and, specifically, what Shana MacDonald and I call “the disinformation of misogyny”), mixed-race representation, and misinformation amid the rise of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Alongside Dr. MacDonald, I’m facilitating a series of workshops from 2024 to 2026 to co-create toolkits that will define and outline how technology-facilitated gender-based violence operates in online and offline spheres and offer media literacies for recognizing and countering the parallel spread of anti-feminist, misogynist, queerphobic, transphobic, and racist disinformation within digital culture and campus communities. We are also co-writing a monograph that charts major feminist happenings from 2013-2023, found across digital media through gathering different provocations, ideas, artifacts, and conversations from our collaborative research over the last decade. The book argues that feminist media in this period articulates a series of what we conceptualize as “utopic refusals” that appear in the hashtags, memes, reels, speeches, protest signs circulating across social media. Last, I’m exploring vernaculars of mixed-race experience on social media, namely Instagram and TikTok, for how they create temporary disruptions and interventions in socio-political contexts.

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Feminist media studies
Feminist and queer affect studies
Feminist new materialisms and posthumanisms
Digital activisms and networked social movements
Social media cultures
Rhetorics of design
Design equity, data feminism, and data justice
Critical approaches to technology