​Join us for the second Emerging Scholar Show and Share panel, where Kate Bradley (University of Ottawa), Dr. Emma Brandt (University of Waterloo), and Dr. Kiera Obbard (University of Guelph) will present their research. This session provides a platform for emerging scholars to share their work, engage in dialogue, and connect with the Digital Feminist Network community. Open to all, this panel invites discussion on critical themes shaping feminist digital scholarship today. 

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PARTICIPANTS: 
Kate Bradley

• Title: The Raging Grannies: A (Historical) Bedtime Story for Raging Girls

• Abstract: The project is a children’s book on the eco-feminist activist group the Raging Grannies. The storybook narrates the founding of the Raging Grannies in 1987 and several of their subsequent demonstrations. The goal of the work is to historicize activist anger and expand historical feminist pedagogy.

• Bio: Kate Bradley is a Master’s student at the University of Ottawa, currently completing a History degree with a specialization in Feminist and Gender Studies. Kate’s research combines childhood studies, material histories, and feminist histories. Her current project explores children’s books created and published by second-wave feminist presses.

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Dr. Emma Brandt

• Title: How to Read News When you Hate News: Methods for Media Fieldwork

• Abstract: As opposed to studies of news production, which can draw from content analyses of published media or participant observation in newsrooms, studying news consumption is a fragmentary, dispersed, and difficult process. People consume news alone, often online, and rarely leaving a trace (except for the most active commenters and reposters). How people make sense of media and how they decide what is trustworthy is not just a response to individual sources, but draws on socially situated knowledges, local histories, and political rubrics. These challenges of studying media are further heightened under conditions of historical and present-day authoritarianism that draw in part on media manipulation. In response, this paper discusses several digital ethnographic methods for studying news consumption with young people who get the majority of their information online. It focuses on the case of Serbia, where institutional distrust, including of media institutions, is high. Methods such as the digital walkthrough, collective readings of media, and online-offline ethnography can facilitate the qualitative study of media under conditions of widespread disbelief and semi-authoritarianism.

• Bio: Emma Brandt is an AMTD Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on the politics of news consumption in democratic and authoritarian regimes and has been supported by the Fulbright program and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

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Dr. Kiera Obbard

• Title: Contexts, Diversity, Poetry: Topic Modelling the Poetess

• Abstract: Using primary and critical source data from JSTOR’s interactive research tool (“JSTOR’s Interactive Research Tool”), and bio-critical data from Orlando: A History of Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (2006-) (Orlando: Women’s Writing), this paper will report on results of my experimentation with topic modelling as a method of getting at diversity or contexts in a large text corpora. This work asks the following questions: What difference does it make to combine primary, critical, and bio-critical data in literary historical inquiry? What does the combination of evidence reveal about the ways in which critical and bio-critical material refers to women writers? What is the semantic relationship between primary, critical, and bio-critical sources? I hypothesize that approaching literary historical inquiry through the deliberate combination of evidence from a wide range of contexts can identify hidden semantic patterns across large text corpora, which can reveal new trends or encourage a re-examination of accepted narratives of the literary historical record. 

• Bio: Kiera Obbard (she/her) is a poet and the Michael Ridley Postdoctoral Scholar in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph, where she studies the feminization and subsequent denigration of women’s writing and associated publishing technologies. Her current book project examines the complex social, cultural, technological and economic conditions that have enabled the success of social media poetry in Canada.