Publications - 2018

Crop Tops and Solidarity Selfies: The Disruptive Politics of Girls' Hashtag Activism

On May 26, 2015 hundreds of teenage girls in Toronto, Canada went to school wearing crop tops—and it quickly became international news. The midriff-bearing teens were participating in what was dubbed “Crop Top Day,” a protest event organized after 17-year-old Alexi Halket was reprimanded by her school principal for wearing a crop top to class on May 25, 2015. According to Halket, she was told that her top looked “too much like a sports bra” and was “inappropriate” for school (Diblasi). Yet Halket refused to change and instead told the principal that she had similar outfits planned for the week. After receiving encouragement from her girlfriends, who also pledged to wear crop tops the next day in support, Halket formalized the #CropTopDay protest by creating a Facebook page and inviting about 300 people from her school to participate. The event spread throughout the teens’ social media networks, resulting in hundreds of girls and boys across the Greater Toronto Area wearing short shirts to school the next day and over 5,000 people using the #CropTopDay Twitter hashtag to publicize the protest (Luxen). By the time the weekend rolled around, the hashtag had been used hundreds of times, and had attracted substantial attention from the wider public.

Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture

Through twelve chapters that historicize and re-evaluate postfeminism as a dominant framework of feminist media studies, this collection maps out new modes of feminist media analysis at both theoretical and empirical levels and offers new insights into the visibility and circulation of feminist politics in contemporary media cultures. The essays in this collection resituate feminism within current debates about postfeminism, considering how both operate as modes of political engagement and as scholarly traditions. Authors analyze a range of media texts and practices including American television shows Being Mary Jane and Inside Amy Schumer, Beyonce’s "Formation" music video, misandry memes, and Hong Kong cinema.

#MeToo and the promise and pitfalls of challenging rape culture through digital feminist activism

Remote Rural Broadband Systems in Canada

Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, I2P, and Tor