About: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism

Digital media has brought renewed popular visibility to feminism and has transformed the meaning and impact of feminist politics. What do such transformations mean for the future of feminist activism, creativity, and collaboration on and offline? Funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2013–2016), this project looks at the reconfiguration of feminist activism in the 21st Century through digital technologies, including the circulation of bodies, protest actions, and creative products through digital, national, and transnational spaces. So far, the project has resulted in a number of collaborative articles, lecture series, individual lectures, and a coauthored book, Awkward Politics, in which Carrie Smith and Maria Stehle develop awkwardness as a means of engaging with feminist activism as it accounts for the uncertainty of popfeminist moments and movements, its slipperiness and uncertainty. Through discussion of social media platforms, hashtags, performance art, film, and literature, among other creative feminist works, we develop awkwardness into a theoretical tool for intervention that has a broad range of applicability, from social movements to the academy.

The project continues to grow in collaborative partnership in the form of an ongoing research blog. If you wish to submit work to the blog, please get in touch.

Read the most recent posts from this project’s research blog