Feminist Think Tank (FTT) has launched the Connect, Create, Customize: Collaborative Toolkit Building for Campus Trust and Safety (3C+) survey that aims to collect data on technologically-facilitated gender-based violence at UW. Results from the survey will support the development of community-centered resources to address online gender-based hate at UW. 

“The survey itself is trying to look into the prevalence, impact, and perceptions of institutional responses to misogyny, but also queerphobia and transphobia on campus. What we’re really trying to do is reinforce the urgency of this kind of research and then provide direct avenues for institutional change,” said Dr. Brianna Weins, co-director of FTT, along with Dr. Shana MacDonald. 

Wiens believes 3C+ will support data-driven and community-centered approaches that will target misogyny as a structural problem. For the co-directors, getting institutions to play their part is only half the journey, ensuring communities and individuals have the tools they need is the other. 

“It is to empower the community to be able to have these conversations which are not easy. We want the institutions to do the labour of keeping the community safe, but also for us to have the tools that we need in our everyday lives to do that work too,” MacDonald said.

The survey asks participants to share whether they have witnessed misogyny in a variety of settings including classrooms, on campus, and interactions with faculty and staff. These questions aim to uncover how prevalent misogyny, queerphobia and transphobia actually are at UW. Wiens noted that instead of pin-pointing individuals, the survey hopes to trace the structural sources of gender-based hate. 

MacDonald and Wiens have worked together on feminist digital activism and feminist resistance for the past 10 years. In the past three to four years, both have noticed misogyny on campus is more directly related to what they think is a public safety crisis. While university spaces are perceived as progressive and inclusive spaces, Wiens said they are also marked by a long history of gendered violence. 

In 1989, 14 women were killed in the Montreal Massacre femicide. Fast forward to 2023, a former UW student stabbed an instructor and two students during a gender studies class at Hagey Hall.

Macdonald and Wiens underlined the role online spaces play in circulating harmful ideologies, such as social media algorithms rewarding misogynistic content with increased visibility and the sharing of hate-driven manifestos online. 

“We now know, because the [UW] attacker was charged with domestic terrorism, that they had a manifesto, which is a part of this misogynist kind of playbook of attacks. There is always a manifesto posted online, or most often. That made very clear for us [to research], how are our students being impacted by the ways in which gender based hate is circulating in internet spaces,” MacDonald said.

MacDonald shared concern about how misogyny was not named as part of the attack on campus by UW. Instead, survey responses so far have indicated that much of the responsibility to combat misogyny, queerphobia, and transphobia at UW is taken up by students rather than institutions like the university.

“What a lot of students, staff and faculty are noticing is that the labor vehicle to do this work falls heavily on student services as well as marginalized staff and faculty,” said Amaya Kodituwakku, a co-op student with FTT. 

FTT is taking an iterative approach in designing the final outcomes of the 3C+ project, basing the decision on the survey data to ensure the final project reflects what survey participants are looking for. 

“Ideally it [the project outcome] is for anybody who is at UW. We’re trying to make customizable toolkits that have a wide range of resources, so that somebody who is coming to that toolkit can sort of pick and choose the things that they need for whatever classroom, project, workshop, talk they’re going to give,” Wiens said. 

FTT has collaborated with various partners on this project including colleagues at the UW history department. The think tank also recently launched a related project called the Digital Feminist Network, collaborating with partners at Guelph, York, McMaster University, and the University of Ottawa. 

The 3C+ survey will remain open until the end of March and there are plans to re-circulate the survey in future terms. For updates and more information, visit FTT’s Instagram page @aesthetic.resistance or https://www.feminist-think-tank.com/projects.