Media and Representation

10:30 AM - 12:00 PM, K8660

Chairs: Victoria E. Thomas & Hannah McGregor

Presentations

Digital mobilization of Outrage Surrounding Liam Conejo Ramos on TikTok - Emily Eckland

Trump's politics often aim to extract outrage from the American people through spectacle. The mass presence of ICE agents and detainments is one of the administration’s latest spectacles, invoking outrage in the American people. This mobilization can be witnessed in anti-ICE protests occurring across the nation. While affective outrage aids in mobilizing people on the ground, my research aims to highlight how digital mobilization around ICE detainment plays out through the medium of TikTok.

In an effort to better understand the ways affective outrage sticks to groups across the political aisle, my research examines how affective outrage is expressed and captured on the platform TikTok, surrounding the detainment of Liam Conejo Ramos. To conduct this research, I analyzed two viral examples of how influencers, both a pro-ICE and an anti-ICE, express outrage in their commentaries. This mobilization highlights the gap between the two depictions of the detainment as a place where misinformation can spread. Analysis of these two TikTok videos, their comments, and other public data is used to measure and depict what this outrage translates to online. Scholars like Jodi Dean, Dan Gretton, Jeff Rice, Sarah Ahmed, and others are used to build an affective framework incorporating populism, outrage, spectacle, and networks, which is utilized as a lens to analyze these two videos.

“It is absolutely not your fault”: Popular Feminism and the Representation of Sex Education and Sexual Violence in Sex Education - Noelle Gesner

This paper examines Sex Education as a form of entertainment-education that modulates affect, resistance, and control within contemporary feminist discourse. Situating the series in a political climate marked by increasing restrictions on sex education and reproductive rights, it argues that popular television operates as a critical pedagogical resource for youth.

The analysis explores representations of sexual violence through Aimee’s sexual assault narrative, where solidarity emerges not from sameness but from shared structural conditions. The show resists the limitations of “popular feminism” by centering intersectional experiences and emphasizing systemic inequities over individualized empowerment. These dynamics are further developed through depictions of collective rage, which reframe anger as a productive, political response to patriarchal violence.

Finally, the paper argues that the series imagines sex education as a collaborative, community-based process that challenges institutional control and censorship. By depicting knowledge as dialogic and relational, Sex Education positions youth not as passive recipients but as active participants in meaning-making. Ultimately, the series demonstrates how entertainment media can function as a site of resistance, fostering critical awareness and collective agency.

The Digital Reboot of the Antebellum Era Minstrel Show: How the Spectacle of Black Female AI-Generated Influencers Utilizes Digital Blackface and the Jezebel Stereotype to Subvert Black Women - Bukola Balogun

To successfully subvert a group of people, it is imperative to own and control their representations in society and condition others to view them as non-human. In the 19th century, apart from chattel slavery, minstrel shows were one of the most popular vehicles in which Europeans could define Blackness. Through blackface performances, white men curated a distorted image of Blackness that was used to justify the mistreatment and degradation of Africans in society. While minstrelsy’s popularity and acceptance have since waned, its tenets have resurfaced through various online tools. Known collectively as digital blackface, this phenomenon refers to how non-blacks co-opt blackness online for political, economic or personal gain. This paper argues that the spectacle of Black Female AI-Generated influencers uses digital blackface to co-opt the image of Black women and hyper sexualized representations through the Jezebel stereotype to engage in a damaging legacy of dehumanizing, exploiting, commodifying, and fetishizing Black women.

Bios

Chair: Dr. Victoria Thomas

Dr. Victoria E. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Media and Public Engagement in the School of Communication. As an interdisciplinary scholar of Black Popular Cultural Studies, she primarily analyzes popular media to articulate how visual culture represents Blackness and Black identities. Her research is committed to political and civic engagement, diversity, and inclusion in public institutions to transform societal conditions. Dr. Thomas’ current research examines the communication practices of Black cisgender and transgender women in our contemporary media moment of hypervisibility of Black transgender women and intersectional feminism.

Read more on the School of Communication website here.

Chair: Dr. Hannah McGregor

Hannah McGregor’s research and teaching focus on the links between publishing and social change, from the role podcasts might play in expanding public engagement with research, to systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry.

Hannah completed her PhD at TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph in 2013, where her research focused on contemporary white Canadian women’s representations of distant suffering. She held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta; her project, “Modern Magazines Project Canada,” was a collaborative initiative that took up the call to read magazines as a form of new media technology that, alongside radio and film, helped to shape the emergent consumer-publics of the twentieth century.

Since 2015, Hannah has been making Witch, Please, a fortnightly podcast about the Harry Potter world with her collaborator Marcelle Kosman. She has written about podcasting and fandom for Hybrid Pedagogy, and about Harry Potter reread podcasts as digital reading communities in Participations. In 2017, Hannah started a new podcast, Secret Feminist Agenda, a weekly discussion of the insidious, nefarious, insurgent, and mundane ways we enact our feminism in our daily lives. Through a collaborative SSHRC-funded project with Siobhan McMenemy, Senior Editor at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, the podcast is being peer-reviewed at the end of each season. In 2018, Hannah also joined the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership as head of the Podcast Task Force, where she is responsible for developing The SpokenWeb Podcast, a collaborative podcast that explores the possibilities of audio-based scholarship for engaging with audio archives. In March 2020, Hannah and Siobhan were awarded a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant to continue developing their work on scholarly podcasting in the form of the Amplify Podcast Network.

Since joining the Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University, Hannah has further expanded her research on Canadian literature and publishing into the contemporary state of the industry. In February 2018, she co-organized Publishing Unbound, a three-day symposium that brought together authors, activists, scholars, and publishing professionals in Canada to discuss inclusivity and accountability in the publishing industry. Her co-edited book, Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018) tackles similar topics, providing a critical and historical context to help readers understand conversations happening about CanLit presently. The Toronto Star described it as “an important collection of immediate responses to [the] fracturing” of CanLit.

For more details about her publications, awards, and teaching experience, see hannahmcgregor.com. She can also be reached on Instagram @hkpmcgregor

Emily Eckland

Emily Eckland is a first-year MA student in the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. She is a seasoned Communications professional and has five years of experience conducting promotions through her social media, written copy, photography, and graphic design skills. As a queer American studying in Canada, she is passionate about shedding light on the complexities of the current political climate under a second Trump administration, as it is presented through the news and social media.

Noelle Gesner

Noelle graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Simon Fraser University in 2024. She is interested in media studies, with a particular focus on film and television. Her research examines the intersections of gender, representation, and power in media, exploring how contemporary narratives both reflect and shape social inequalities.

Bukola Balogun

Bukola is an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University who is currently completing a joint major in Communication and Business with a concentration in marketing.

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