Search Results (8)

This paper examines how Marley Dias’ activism on Instagram promotes racial justice, Black feminist thought, and youth mobilization through digital storytelling, representation, and audience engagement. Using a mixed-methods analysis of 744 posts published between 2016 and 2025, the study combined critical thematic coding, temporal mapping, and engagement metrics to analyze the discursive and emotional strategies behind Dias’ activism. Five key themes were identified as central to her activist work: diversity in literature, lack girl empowerment, racial justice, Black representation, and educational advocacy. The findings reveal that Dias strategically tailors her messages to suit Instagram’s unique features, using carousels and videos to enhance visibility, foster intimacy, and provide depth in education. Posts that focused on identity, aesthetics, and empowerment garnered the highest levels of engagement, while posts that concentrated on structural issues received lower, yet still significant, interaction. The paper argues that Dias’ Instagram account serves as a dynamic platform for youth-led Black feminist resistance, where cultural production, civic education, and emotional impact converge. This case underscores the political potential of digital literacies and encourages a reconsideration of how youth-driven digital activism is reshaping contemporary public discourse, agency, and knowledge production in the social media age. Full article

The institution of slavery engineered racialized gendered capitalism that locks Black women in multiple social identity-labeled boxes on the sociocultural and economic hierarchy. Acts of cultural invasion have produced controlling images and oppressive narratives to maintain the status quo of white male wealth and power. Critical race theory scholars have offered counter-storytelling as a theorizing method to study the impact of intersectional oppression on Black women and to develop strategies for resistance and healing for those who are at the margins of society. This manuscript weaves the voices of Black feminists with a creative arts methodology to explore resistance and healing practice rooted in lived experience and provides a case example of counter-storytelling in a predominantly white academic space. For future directions, there is a need for guidelines on how to navigate the use of counter-storytelling to safely engage and protect the Black woman’s humanity and not be a tool for public displays of Black pain or for trauma voyeurism. Full article

This personal narrative is a critical reflection and affirmation letter to Black women. Throughout this commentary, at the end of each section, I have included what I call “gems”. I hope they serve as a manifesto for our collective healing from working in institutions that center on the ideologies and practices of dominance. This piece particularly focuses on the dominant ideology and practice of “whiteness” within institutions as a surveillance tool through policy that directly impacts Black women’s wellbeing through gender anti-black racism. Through storytelling and drawing on Black feminist scholarship, this narrative exposes the challenges I faced with institutional policies and practices as I pursued my career in both academia and social service work. Throughout this narrative, I highlight how the undercurrent of whiteness is embedded in the foundation of institutional policy and practices. This narrative serves as a demand for institutional accountability and reckoning with the coloniality of epistemology and ontology. There is a great emotional toll for Black women who are confronting and resisting gendered anti-black racism with deep internal struggles and triumphs. The violent institutional practices seek to eclipse Black women’s ability to dream, imagine and create. Whiteness is centered in institutional infrastructure, serves as a distraction, and impedes our ability to conceptualize the world we desire. We deserve to have imagination in our work. This narrative is a reflection of the harm of whiteness, a guide for Black women academics, a manifesto for change, and a testament to our humanity. Full article

This feminist semiotic study explores the folkloric imaginary of the jinn in the context of children’s and young adults’ Arab Gothic literature. Across the Middle East, the jinn is a common trope in literature, folklore and oral storytelling who, in diegetic terms, can manifest as the Gothic figure of an aging female, deranged older woman or succubus (known as sa’lawwa in Arabic). In this study, a novel feminist semiotic framework is developed to explore the extent to which the Gothic female succubus either haunts or liberates Arab girls’ coming-of-age fictions. This issue is addressed via a feminist semiotic reading of the narratives of Middle Eastern woman author @Ranoy7, exploring the appeal of her scary stories presented on YouTube. Findings reveal tacit fears, ambivalences and tensions embodied within the Arab Gothic sign of the aging female succubus or jinn. Overall, the research develops feminist insights into the semiotic motif of the female jinn and its role in constituting Arab females as misogynistic gendered sign objects in the context of the social media story explored. Full article

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s work offers crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms. Full article

U.S. imperialism in the Philippines has led to the multiple generations of diasporic conditions of colonial amnesia and systematic forgetting of history. Its impact on the Filipinx community has left unrecorded memories and voices of immigrants silenced, and considered lost to history. This study examines the relationship between U.S. colonialism and imperialism in the Philippines and the experiences of Filipinx immigration to the U.S. through a critical Indigenous feminist lens of visual imagery and storytelling. Given that many of the experiences within the Filipinx diaspora in relation to the American Empire have been systematically forgotten and erased, this study utilizes family photographs in framing the challenges and reinscribes harmful hegemonic U.S. colonial and imperial narratives. With a combination of semi-structured interviews and photo analysis as a form of visual storytelling, the family photographs within the Filipinx diaspora may reframe, challenge, and resist hegemonic U.S. colonial and imperial narratives by holding memories of migration, loss, family belonging, and community across spatial and generational boundaries that attempt to erase by the U.S. nation-state. Results shed light on resistance and survivance through bayanihan (community care) spirit. Full article

In this article, Metis scholar and psychotherapist Cathy Richardson, together with Swedish psychotherapist, Christina Löwenborg, write about their family, their shared genealogy and their experience of connection and roots in what some might call feminist genealogy or feminist storytelling. This history spans four generations, two continents and a cultural divide. The authors share a great-grandmother, Ellen-Maria Ekström, who lived in Småland in southern Sweden, from 1876–1951. In this paper, the authors explore the implications of being co-descendants of Ellen-Maria and the heritage—women’s knowledge that comes from their maternal relations. Full article

Public museums and art galleries in Canada are highly authoritative, and trusted knowledge and identity mobilising institutions, whose exhibitions are frequently a ‘blank page’ of erasure, silencing, and marginalisation, in terms of women’s histories, experiences, and contributions. Feminist exhibitions are a response to this, but few in Canada have been explored as practices of feminist community adult education. I begin to address this gap with an analysis of two feminist exhibitions: In Defiance: Indigenous Women Define Themselves, curated by Mohawk-Iroquois artist, Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde, at the Legacy Gallery, University of Victoria; and Fashion Victims: The Pleasures & Perils of Dress in the 19th Century, curated by Ryerson Professor Alison Matthews David, at the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto. Although dissimilar in form, focus, and era, these exhibitions act as powerful intentional pedagogical processes of disruption and reclamation, using images and storytelling to animate, re-write and reimagine the ‘blank pages’ of particular and particularised histories and identities. Through the centrality of women’s bodies and practices of violence, victimization, and women’s power, these exhibitions encourage the feminist oppositional imagination, dialogic looking, gender consciousness, and a visual literacy of hope and possibility. Yet, as women’s stories become audible through the very representational vehicles and institutional spaces used to silence them, challenges remain. Full article