Signal

Thank you to everyone who joined us across the three days where we gathered researchers, students, practitioners, and community members to ask: how do we understand and push back against the digital conditions shaping gendered harm, radicalization, and public life?

A representative from Public Safety Canada opened the summit by tracing Canada’s evolving approach to counter radicalization, which is moving toward a public health model of community-centred care and away from exceptionalism. Pamela Braza Pitman (EDI-R) pushed us to interrogate what genuine partnership with communities actually requires and UW colleagues Brenda Lee (Physics & Astronomy), Yu-Ru Liu (Pure Math), and Rebecca MacAlpine (Educational Technologies Sandbox Supervisor) showed us what grassroots culture change looks like, department by department, program by program. To end the day, Adra Raine (EDI-R Fellow, Educator, Writer) guided us through feminist erasure poetry, using the language of existing texts against itself to surface what official discourse obscures.

On day two, Trish Van Katwyk (School of Social Work, Renison University College), Kim Lopez (Recreation & Leisure), and Alana Cattapan (Political Science) connected necropolitics, reproductive politics, and migrant care labour to show how the same logics of disposability run through all of them. In collaboration with Women in Math, Co-Directors Brianna Wiens (English Language & Literature) and Shana MacDonald (Communication Arts) discussed success, boundaries, and burnout in academic life. Our student panel (Amaya Kodituwakku, Andie Kaiser, Anna McWebb and Rency Luan, Blaze Welling, Samantha Fowler, Spencer Kim, and Irma Jean Cusack Striepe and Ollie Dietrich) reminded us why this work matters and who is carrying it forward. Alex Pershai (EDI-R) gave us an inside look at UW’s Trans and Non-Binary Equity Strategy, and Scarlett van Berkel (W3+) closed the day with a creative hour drawn from The Book of Alchemy, by Suleika Jaouad making space for reflection and connection as a group.

We concluded the summit on day three in Hagey Hall 139, deliberately, because that room carries history on this campus, and it mattered to us to fill it with feminist and queer intent and community. Dr. Jaigris Hodson’s (Royal Roads University) keynote on “disinformation by omission” named what communicative capitalism rewards: the spread of dehumanizing, misogynist content, regardless of intent. We were left thinking: “who is doing the clean-up of media toxicity, and how do we protect ourselves in the meantime? Our postdoctoral panel (Emma Brandt, Laura Blanco-Murcia, Kiera Obbard, and Michael Iantorno) offered frameworks for surviving and resisting toxic media environments, from ethnography to erasure poetry to care-based counternarratives. We also spent time with ManoWhisper, SIGNAL’s open-access database of podcast transcripts from right-wing and manosphere media. This tool, created by Nick Ruest (York University), helps us to see, clearly, what is being said on manosphere podcasts and how such vitriol spreads. You can read more about ManoWhisper in this recently published article in Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Reflecting on the summit, we return to three principles from organizer adrienne maree bown: small is all (our actions move outward in fractal ways); trust that the people in the room are exactly who needs to be there in that moment to do the work; and move at the speed of trust amongst those gathered. This summit felt like evidence of all three. We look forward to future SIGNAL events that can continue the momentum and work of this and the Fall event held at UOttawa and hosted by co-director Jada Watson.

Enormous thanks to our speakers,workshop leaders, and our research team: Spencer Kim, Thuvaraka Mahenthiran, Amaya Kodituwakku, Andie Kaiser, and Dr. Laura Blanco-Murcia. A huge thank you as well to Wendy Philpott and Elizabeth Rogers for their hard work on the SIGNAL website and for promotions, and to Suzy Malik from Light Up the Sky for branding, graphic design, and on-site archival illustrations to capture the event.

For more behind our thoughts leading up to the event please check out a podcast episode we recorded with UW’s EDI-R Office. Head to the SIGNAL website to listen.

The summit was supported by the Global Futures Network and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Funding updates: We recently found out we were not successful in securing funding via the Partnership Grant Stage 1 competition. We are disappointed but remain undeterred in seeking support for the crucial work all of us in the network undertake. We know this is vital research and activism and we will keep finding ways to meet, collaborate, and pursue future funding opportunities. In the short-term this means we will not hold our SIGNAL Summer Meeting but will instead re-group and consider ways to gather together in community later in 2027.

A quieter season ahead: As we welcome the ease that summer sun and breezes bring, we are happy to take things a little slower and welcome the necessary rest that is a part of doing this work. As always, we are happy to hear your ideas for network and/or public facing collaborative opportunities but we also want to honor the importance of letting research and ideas marinate and emerge in time.

Reading Group Fall 2026: We wanted to share a sneak peak of what we’re hoping to read together in the Fall. For those who are new, we run a monthly reading group during the term that is hybrid. Members are welcome to attend having read any or none of the text and join in the larger conversation. For Fall 2026 we have selected: How We Get Free (New Edition 2026) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (September), The Future is Disabled Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (October), and Hope in Dark Times Rebecca Solnit (November). Stay tuned to sign up and get links to the texts.

Stay in touch: Now that we have this newsletter, it will be much easier to quickly share information to our community. If you have any publications, research milestones, upcoming events you want us to circulate please send them our way! If you email any information you want shared to signal@uwaterloo.ca we will make sure to add it here.

Consultations - AI Policy Position Paper

Everyone, everywhere is talking about the proliferation of AI. But what has been less focused on (though certainly not entirely ignored) is the intersection of AI and technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). From the development of AI technology to the drafting of policies for AI use, there is a gap and a marked absence of a clear, human-centred approach to AI.

Over the coming months, Kiera Obbard and Abi Lemak (both part of SIGNAL) will be leading an initiative to address this gap. The primary goal of the initiative is to produce a collaboratively developed position paper that maps current global policy landscapes, identifies emerging harms, and outlines a feminist, human-centered, and anti-oppressive framework for governing and using AI. From this core paper, the team will develop a suite of practical policy briefs and accessible web content designed to support universities and organizations that are currently under-resourced but urgently trying to respond to AI governance challenges.

The broader aim is not just to react to AI as an inevitability, but to intervene in how it is imagined, regulated, and implemented, and to offer a concrete, adaptable model for ethical, accountable, and human-centered AI policies.

What we need from you: Kiera and Abi will be holding consultations across SIGNAL’s institutional nodes to get your insights on this policy intervention by SIGNAL. The consultations will be held over Teams and will take approximately 2 hours.

If you are interested in participating, please sign up using this form by June 15, 2026.