Announcements
The Talking Back Feminist Media Conference: Track One Session Descriptions
Illustration: Saul Freedman-Lawson
Join us at the Talking Back Feminist Media Conference on November 16 and 17 at the Toronto Media Arts Centre! Tickets on sale now
This post gives detailed descriptions of the sessions in Track One. Please see the other tracks here:
For details on our Arts Market vendors, please see the post here.
For information on art exhibitions and lunchtime micro-talks, please see the post here.
Track One:
Community-Centered Media Processes and Sustainable Movements
How can we re-imagine processes of production to be in line with feminist politics? What is our relationship to capital and productivity? How can we create and sustain media spaces that are accountable, caring, and safe? What are our broader goals as feminist media makers and consumers?
SESSION 1a:
Time to Call in Call Outs
Workshop
Presented by: Maud Mostly
Sunday, November 17
10:00am
The world of social media is constantly growing, changing, and adapting in so many ways it can be hard for us to keep up. In this constantly evolving format, we need to reflect on our practices, and decide when something should be left behind. Call out culture has been hurting online communities by turning accountability into a sentence that has begun to hamper people’s ability to join, learn, and make mistakes. This has had negative consequences in our communities as a whole, but also on the mental health of those within them. This workshop aims to open the floor for a reflective discussion that we may not be able to find online. It is time we talk about how we can appropriately hold people accountable and how our current social media presence affects our values, and brainstorm ways individuals can socially shift media platforms. In this world where nothing is truly black or white, let’s get together and talk about how each one of us can create more open, positive, and brave spaces in our online worlds.
SESSION 1b:
We Need New Guidelines: Editorial Processes in Inclusive Feminist Publications
Interactive Presentation
Presented by: Sarah Cuddie
Saturday, November 16
10:00am
The old editorial standards and style guides haven’t kept up with progress. Traditional guides often ignore identities, historical context, and the changing culture of our communities. So where do you start if you’re trying to publish a health magazine that is inclusive, ethical, and reflective of your readership? How do you include accurate medical and health information that is accessible? How do you navigate all of this when your editors don’t reflect the full scope of your readership? How do you do all of this with a small team of volunteers? The editorial team at Womanly Magazine has been grappling with these questions over the course of creating our first 5 issues, and have had to interrogate our own biases and positionality to come up with a kind of style guide that reflects our values and our community. This collaborative process has involved some difficult honest conversations and a lot of research, and continues to be a bit messy; it is also vital to our work as a team. This is a review of what we’ve learned, where we’ve landed, and some ideas on creating editorial guidelines and processes of your own.
CONTENT WARNING
Discussion of marginalization and erasure in editorial practices.
Session 1c:
Crafting Sapphic Spaces
Participatory discussion
Presented by: Ayat Salih and Adele Lukusa
Saturday, November 16
4:00pm
If you did a Google search right now for sapphic events, the landscape would be vastly different from one or two years ago. And that’s just the thing: spaces and events for sapphic folks — for lesbian women and enbies, for bisexual and pansexual women, for queer women — aren’t as consistent and permanent as they should be. Through our toolkit, we are trying to increase the number of accessible and inclusive queer spaces made by and for sapphic folks, in the GTA and beyond.
In order to give you the unfiltered truth about sapphic event organizing — from budgeting, planning and more — we’ve organized our own event based off the toolkit. At the core of Crafting Sapphic Spaces is the willingness to involve and include community in our work, which is why we’d like to open up the discussion and take questions and comments! Not only that, we invite you, the audience, to collage your ideas of an accessible, inclusive sapphic event and toolkit covers, to eventually be picked for Crafting Sapphic Spaces’ second edition! All works will be posted in a makeshift gallery for admirers and participants to see.
CONTENT WARNING
Discussion of experiences of isolation or harassment while being sapphic.
Session 1d:
Feminist Narratives on Cities
Art-shop
Presented by: Cheryll Case of CP Planning; others TBD
Sunday, November 17
4:00pm
When you think about the City, what words and images would come to mind, if Cities reflected your feminist ideals? In this facilitated art-shop, collaborate to create a multi-media collage that describes a City where feminists thrive. What conversations are held in private, public, and media spaces? Who speaks, who listens, who is heard? What are the themes of conversation? Answer and pose questions in your work.
While making our collage, we will continue our conversation, comparing and contrasting our feminist perspectives against what is taking place in various private, public and media spaces. Our art will evolve as we share our perspectives and explore feminist narratives. In the final moments of this session, we will observe our art, and share a conversation to reflect on our experience, compare, and contrast our work with the existing dominant narratives on Cities.
