Brianna I. Wiens

Assistant Professor

Photo of Brianna Wiens.

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

Extension: 41284
Office: HH 255
Email: biwiens@uwaterloo.ca

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.). Forthcoming Winter 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

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

I’m currently working on a series of related projects that think about solidarity, digital feminisms, and resistance. First, I’m wrapping up a companion anthology to my recent co-edited collection (Networked Feminisms, Lexington) titled Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies. This collection focuses on how feminists resist through creating the kinds of spaces that center people who have been marginalized, without pathologizing their everyday discrimination, so that stories that have been silenced can be amplified, gain momentum, and flourish. Second, I’m working on a manuscript that outlines “intersectional entanglements,” the theoretical framework I developed during my doctoral work. Intersectional entanglements offer an approach to analyzing the pressing social movements of our time, like #MeToo, turning us towards the complex and interrelated technocultural, sociopolitical, material, and power interactions of digitally mediated spaces. Last, alongside Dr. MacDonald, I’m co-writing a monograph on Utopic Refusals: Aesthetic Resistance and Justice Through Intersectional Feminist Media. This book is a formalization of the method of following our hunches and our curiosities––of dwelling, and collecting, and collaborating, and remediating, and of poking and prodding at the status quo––to chart major feminist happenings from 2012-2022. We follow the trail of feminist uses of aesthetic media resistance and analyze them for the ways they foster kinships to explore, name, and respond to community.