Visitor Talk: Brianna Wiens

This talk will draw on Wiens’s interdisciplinary work as the Codirector of Feminist Think Tank (FTT), a research-creation media lab committed to intervening into white supremacy, misogyny, and queer and transphobia. This talk analyzes FTT’s Instagram account, @aesthetic.resistance, as a contemporary example of intersectional feminist scholarly practices that contribute to the building of small-scale community dialogues and relationships. @aesthetic.resistance functions as (a) a design intervention into prevailing Instagram culture that amplifies voices from LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and other marginalized communities in its push against the colonial capitalist heteropatriarchy; (b) a digital database of feminist historical and contemporary media practices and current activist movements; and (c) an online space for

discussions about these topics. This account is a space to cultivate digital methodologies and tools for feminist resistance, considering complex events, actions, and contestations that influence our processes of data-production, analysis, and remediation. FTT leverages traditional media tactics to intervene into harmful digital cultures in order to generate new conceptual paradigms and make explicit interventions into institutional cultures. Importantly, online discussions are brought offline through workshops at our maker space at

the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo. In our workshops, digital artifacts (e.g., memes, hashtag discourses, etc.) are materialized through art and performance in order to engage in processes of vulnerable and equitable co-creation of knowledge across differently lived experiences. This talk will emphasize the importance of engaging in both digital and material solidarities–– in slowing down our digital encounters into material, multimodal, and embodied interactions to strengthen community building.