Feminist Media in a Globalized World
Feminist media have shone a light on the complexity of social life under global conditions of armed conflict, political struggle, exploitation and disenfranchisement. However, the proliferation of new media in the 21st century has radically changed how such conditions are displayed and distributed. The political potency of amateur video, activists’ use of web platforms to make international appeals for redress and artists’ engagement with the global dimensions of gender inequality (in everything from video installations to public actions) require new research tools to respond to the interdisciplinary and decentralized landscape of global media cultures.
Dr. Krista Geneviève Lynes, Canada Research Chair in Feminist Media Studies, aims to improve understanding of how new media technologies and increased channels of circulation (from social network sites to museum exhibitions) affect how feminist cultural producers visualize feminist political struggle. She is investigating the global scale of media and its effect on transnational social movements, while remaining attentive to local specificity of feminist struggles.
Lynes is founding a feminist media studio that will provide a forum for staging historical examples of feminist media art to forge a link between early experimental and interventionist media and present day creative and critical practices. The studio will also devise aesthetic strategies to visualize gender-based oppression and exploitation, attentive to the challenges of working across racial, gendered, class-based, and other divisions. Accordingly, Lynes is developing a feminist research network to critically engage the decentralized, collective and networked nature of cultural production.
Lynes’s research will develop a feminist approach to experimental media and contemporary art in a globalized world.