Voice 2 (Olivia) Hello and thank you for tuning in to our podcast, the MAMM Report, my name is Olivia Hay, I am a graduate student in Brock University’s Department of English Language and Literature, and my research interests are primarily Canadian literature written by women. Today I’m joined by…
Voice 1 (Emily) Emily Mills! Hi, folks. I am also a student at Brock University, except I was an undergrad in the Department of Geography and Tourism Studies. Now, I’m going into my Master’s in Social Justice and Equity Studies to research how intersecting power discourses impact gendered citizenship and reproductive rights in our rural corner of Niagara, Ontario. But, let’s get back to where we connect…For the past nine-ish months, Olivia and I have been working as student research assistants on the Mapping Ann Marie MacDonald project—which we refer to as MAMM. Dr. Neta Gordon, Dr. Aaron Mauro, and Dr. Ebru Ustundag are the primary grant holders and investigators of the MAMM project. Today we wanted to share a discussion of our experiences as emerging scholars working on this collaborative and interdisciplinary project, one which demonstrates the potential of exploring an ethics of care in academia through collaboration and female friendship. And before we move on, Olivia, I want to make a quick note to our listeners that we understand an ethics of care a commitment to be compassionate, responsible, and vulnerable in our relations with the world, including each other.
(Voice 2) Olivia: Yes! Exactly. Now, to preface our discussion, Ann Marie MacDonald is a Canadian author, actor and playwright who has written four novels and several plays. MAMM is currently ending phase 1 of our project where we’ve been working with MacDonald’s 2003 novel The Way the Crow Flies to explore geocritical digital mapping projects. In other words, we’ve been combing through the novel to find specific references to locations which we have then collated onto a map as a way of not only visualizing character routes – for example – but also exploring the geography of the novel, and as an aside if you want to follow the project as it develops further or check out our interactive map, we’ll have a link in our show notes at the end. But circling back to my discussion with Emily, on this episode, we’ll be reflecting on our experiences as new researchers, who have benefited from the framework of data feminism which the MAMM project highlights. Data Feminism comes from Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein 2020 book of the same name and the term refers to “a way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought” (D’Ignazio and Klein 8).
Voice 1 (Emily): Now, where I want to start—because, as a geographer, I think it’s fascinating to consider—is how MacDonald’s interest in different relational strategies to orient and make room for oneself within a particular time and place has really given us the freedom to do the same within the context of our work. Olivia and I have created safe spaces – often moving beyond the boundaries of “academic space,” and flowing, for example, into coffee shops and around kitchen tables – which have allowed us to challenge each other’s perspectives while also navigating the field of digital humanities and the complexities of care in academia.
Voice 2 (Olivia): Today Emily and I want to highlight our authentic experiences with the politics of feminist friendship and collaboration, including the “mess” of praxis and care, often hidden in the mobilization of knowledge. And when we refer to our praxis we mean our research process and how this is embodied.
Voice 1 (Emily): In 2020, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein published the book Data Feminism, where they conceptualized seven core principles for just knowledge production. After reading this work, Olivia and I found ourselves resonating with two—the first, to elevate emotion and embodiment, and, the second, to make labor visible—which provided us with the language to unpack our collaboration. Now, we want to take some time to have a discussion and work through their relevance to the tools and experiences that we encountered while working on this project.
Voice 2 (Olivia): But, before engaging in our discussion, Emily, I would like to outline how D’Ignazio and Klein define each of these principles. The first principle to “elevate emotion and embodiment,” encourages “us to value multiple forms of knowledge, including the knowledge that comes from people as living feeling bodies in the world” (D’Ignazio and Klein 18). The second principle, “make labour visible,” states that data science “is the work of many hands” and “Data feminism makes this labor visible so that it can be recognized and valued” (D’Ignazio and Klein 18).
Voice 1 (Emily): Awesome. And to wrap-up this sort of theoretical overview, I think it’s useful to make plain our two intentions in having—and especially publishing—this discussion. First, we want to show that, by implementing principles of data feminism into research, scholars can more easily work in an interdisciplinary way and distance themselves from “traditional” models of knowledge production, which privilege and value the lone academic. And, second, we want to make the case that because data feminism accounts for the individuals collecting the data, it allows friendships—like ours—to form. Sound good?
Voice 1 (Olivia): Sounds good. Let’s start thinking about our first principle from D’Ignazio and Klein, which is: Elevate emotion & embodiment.
Voice 2 (Emily): Cool. Well, we know that within the “traditional” North American academic models for many disciplines, the prevailing standard (or myth) is that research tends to be done in isolation. This standard follows from a neoliberal logic of academia wherein scholars compete to produce work for their institutions and funding agencies. But this structure positions colleagues as competitors and has, therefore, faced a significant amount of critique within the literature on knowledge production. However, all that being said, isolated research can be ethical and—to be transparent—has produced some of my best work. Would you agree, Olivia?
Voice 2 (Olivia): Agreed.
Voice 1 (Emily): Right. So, the purpose of our discussion can’t—and I don’t think will—become a villainization of “traditional” methods of knowledge production. Instead, we need to create space to just understand and appreciate the process of co-producing research through a feminist friendship.
Voice 2 (Olivia): I think as well that our discussion allows us to further consider and open up the conversation on how co-produced work can be informed through feminist thought. In its most fundamental form, collaboration is the act of working on something with other people, though even this definition can be further complicated.
Voice 1 (Emily): Yes! For example, as a critical and feminist geographer, I understand people as emplaced within power structures. So, within this context, collaboration—at least that which leads to justice in knowledge production—requires us to be reflexive, such as through questioning and disrupting learned hierarchies that dictate how we think we should orient and perform ourselves. You know? It makes me think of how our team has always recognized that a junior research assistant—like me—embodies knowledge about the world that contributes to our work and, therefore, their voice holds the same inherent value as a colleague with more academic experience—such as you, Olivia.
Voice 2 (Olivia): Agreed. Our collaboration has led us to develop that ethic of care – which Emily mentioned earlier – as we assume responsibility for our teammates. So, this praxis demands that we value the multiple forms of knowledge that bring meaning to our research and the person that embodies that work.
Voice 1 (Emily): And—to add more context for listeners—we should outline that, since the beginning of our work, Olivia and I have navigated this collaborative process as feminist friends. And, the scholarship I’ve read on feminist friendship often positions it as a liberating tool for academics…I think we could both agree.
Voice 2 (Olivia): Yeah, I would.
Voice 1 (Emily): Same. I’d argue that our friendship has allowed us to develop the trust needed to be vulnerable with our experiences as researchers in-training, which has provided us with much-needed (perhaps even self-preserving?) mutual affirmation.
Voice 2 (Olivia): Pivoting from that contextualization of our work, Emily and I would now like to further explore our roles within MAMM as embodied and emotional individuals. We met in November 2023, when the team held its first meeting. Dr. Neta Gordon asked the team members to introduce themselves—I think Emily you’ll agree we were all nervous in this moment.
Voice 1 (Emily) Absolutely.
Voice 2 (Olivia) Right? Like, no one wants to mess up their chance to verbalize their potential value to the work. I remember going first, mentioning that I was doing my master’s – exploring pockets of feminist friendship and the positives of the dark body of female friendships within patriarchal community structures, specifically in Anabaptist-Mennonite literature.
Voice 1 (Emily): Your research is so cool.
Voice 2 (Olivia): Thank you.
Voice 1 (Emily): Anyways, afterwards, I explained to the group that, in the next fall, I’d be focusing my thesis on the intersections of different power discourses and gendered citizenship in rural Niagara, ultimately working to conceptualize its impact on the status of reproductive rights. So, it was really in this conversation that we found our first touching point: a feminist frustration.
And, within a week, we had decided to have a coffee date to discuss the intersections between our research interests. I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you before, Olivia, but I was feeling really unsettled as I walked across campus to meet you. I was insecure in being an undergraduate student because, what would you, a graduate student, benefit from our conversation? You know? I was thinking about research, meanwhile, you were actually doing research. But, of course, this concern was resolved as we began to speak, ultimately sharing the stories that brought us to that moment.
Voice 2 (Olivia): And Emily and I quickly found many similarities amongst these stories; for example, we share a passion for reading, exhaustion with far-right family members, and more. So while this first conversation was intended to be a transaction of knowledge, it evolved into a truth-telling session wherein we found ourselves positioned as allies.
Voice 1 (Emily): I think it was for this reason that, as the weeks progressed, we completely stopped placing academic intentions on our gatherings. And, in line with this transition, we also found ourselves in more open places, including restaurants, farmers markets, and downtown events. I would conceptualize this as a transition into intimate geographies.
Voice 2 (Olivia): While we were choosing new backgrounds that accompanied the senses—such as comfort, chaos, and excitement—associated with the growth of an emotional attachment, we were also developing a unique relational space. This relational space, unlike absolute or boxed space, becomes occupational through its connections; so, it’s mobile.
Voice 1 (Emily): It was this space-making characteristic of our relationship that allowed us to evolve how we thought about and participated in the academic spaces of our work. Our meetings were held in classrooms that you and I have both experienced as students, which means that these spaces hold memories—and therefore emotions—for us that are unrelated to MAMM.
Voice 2 (Olivia): If you’ll indulge my English major tendencies, Emily, suppose we use the simile that classrooms are like students’ institutional living rooms. In that case, we can understand that depending on which department our meetings occurred within, we took turns being the “guest” and the “host.” The former of these positionalities is associated with a learned smallness, which can be visualized, for example, through the containing of our work materials to a small section of the desk.
Voice 1 (Emily): I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought, Olivia, but, in these moments, it was so interesting how we found ourselves developing connections to the novel we were coding. There is this passage I have engrained in my mind where Madeleine—the protagonist, for those listening—describes the feeling of “belonging and not belonging,” and “being on the inside and outside at the same time” (MacDonald, 64). We were evolving our subjectivities as team members with Madeline, and through the text more generally—this is something I wish we had more time to unpack, but alas, I digress…
Voice 2 (Olivia): We’ll just have to record another conversation. Anyways, returning to the main point: the spatial tensions in our positionalities were most prevalent in the beginning stages of our research. As our friendship developed, so did the relational space we could claim. Let’s revisit our trusted living room simile. We remained the “host” in our home departments, but we transitioned from “guest” to “friend” when we were visiting the other’s department. In this sense, a positive feedback loop was created as our spatial authorities—and therefore comforts—enlarged with our emotional connection.
Voice 1 (Emily): Absolutely. But, also, most of our work within the MAMM team is done online. We have our mapping projects, coding spreadsheets, and work logs—which, for the listeners, are essentially just collaborative Word documents with a table to document when team members are working on different elements of the project and the questions or concerns that are arising. These work logs have been critical in allowing us to document our living experiences, so I want to make sure we chat about our interactions in this virtual form of space.
Voice 2 (Olivia): Yes! The work logs were a compelling insight into how we navigated emotion and—like you were starting to touch upon—embodied space outside of the immediate (or material?) realm.
Voice 1 (Emily): I agree. Let’s back-up and add some context…So, as research assistants, we were responsible for coding the entire novel, which meant going through the book sentence-by-sentence to extrapolate data into a spreadsheet. So, despite coming from a geographic training, I was responsible for understanding and implementing literary terms, like focalizer and function, in addition to more familiar geographic terms, like scale and sense of place, when collecting data. The same challenge applied to you, Olivia, but with reversed expertise. And these different gaps in knowledge created insecurities in our capacities to contribute to the team. I’ve joked to you about this before, Olivia, but it’s true…I often wondered: “How can I contribute meaningful work when I’m still uncertain about the difference between plot and theme?”
Voice 2 (Olivia): As you articulate, Emily, there is real vulnerability in those jokes and our friendship and its established level of trust created a space for this feeling. I know there have been moments where we would often text one another on a communication channel separate from the rest of the team—which, again, comes back to the extension of our relational space—to get confirmation on how we were coding the data. I think our open communication was possible because there is a difference between how one is allowed to present themselves to a colleague versus a friend. That latter position is distanced from professional expectations. Overall, through our discussions, we validated the other’s expertise and, therefore, purpose within the team.
Voice 1 (Emily): Yes! And our work logs encouraged us to be empathetic with one another’s fluctuating rhythms, even when these destabilized the balance of our work. For instance, during the spring exam season, Olivia often prefaced her entries with a sentence resembling “I’m just doing a little bit of work in between grading.” But, understanding her situation, I could translate this to “I’m trying to be helpful, but I’m really tired.”
Voice 2 (Olivia): At this same time, Emily was taking a couple of undergraduate courses and engaged in another research assistantship, but—in contrast to me—had a much lighter workload. As a member of the feminist collective MAMM team, Emily could work more to bring the project into balance. However, once the spring term ended, these expectations began to balance, and we returned to a stable state with our division of labour. So, depending on the point in the term, we verbalized and acted upon the need for uneven expectations—an accommodation born out of our ethic of care.
Voice 1 (Emily): And, we can understand the importance of using an ethic of care to elevate emotion and embodiment—even when it feels uncomfortable—through the second principle we have selected from D’Ignazio and Klein, which is to “make labour visible.” So, should we move on?
Voice 2 (Olivia): Let’s do it!
Voice 1 (Emily): Cool. Let’s return to how you, Olivia, would preface your entries in our work log: “I’m just doing a little bit of work in between grading.” Through this statement, we—your team members—could witness how you were surveilling your work outputs, which, again, we knew were limited due to your other responsibilities.
Voice 2 (Olivia): I’ve found, in an isolated praxis we have more capacity to hide our work and, therefore, ourselves. So we might lie about our progress until we have – for example a finished and polished essay – to show. This hiding is a form of self-preservation against a neoliberal—and frankly ableist—culture that judges us based on our “productivity.” However, this coping mechanism becomes unavailable when co-producing knowledge on shared documents. I think we become dependent on navigating our shame through continual self-justification. Even when we face challenging emotions, like shame, we must continue to give them a platform. Through becoming vulnerable, we make ourselves visible—and when something is visible, it can be recognized. Leaning on Sara Ahmed’s (2017) sentiment that “citation is a feminist memory” (p. 15), from her aptly named Living a Feminist Life, we understand this recognition as a political act. We have learned to witness the work of our colleagues—because, at this point, we think our dialogue needs to extend beyond our friendship—and contextualize the labour required for each output, therefore encouraging us to hold a unique appreciation for each team member.
Voice 1 (Emily): Yeah. You know, I hold so much gratitude for how our tools within this work make space for the act—and not just the idea—of making labour visible. Whether working on data collection, like…pairing images from MacDonald’s archive to specific data points or plotting those points on a map, there’s a work log that allows us to document the labour that’s been invested. And, like we started chatting about earlier, these work logs also became excellent and low-pressure mediums to ask questions to both other student research assistants and the senior project leads. We are all there—albeit at different times and behind different screens kilometers apart—but there, nonetheless, learning (and re-learning) together.
Voice 2 (Olivia): I absolutely agree! To build on Emily’s point further, our worklogs interrupt typical academic structures based on working in isolation. Within our data collection Excel sheet we have a built in second encoder space. This acknowledges and holds space for the fact that we are human and are sometimes unsure. The second encoder allows someone to have their work checked without worrying that they will be judged for being unsure or wrong. The work logs do not allow us to hide our labour. I think as another scholar Emily would agree that we are so used to trying to be perfectionists on the first go that we will hide any work in progress or work that we feel does not meet our incredibly high standards.
Voice 1 (Emily): Agreed, and as you touched upon, our work logs prevented us from escaping surveillance and the questions that come from having our labour observed; so, it’s not necessarily a comfortable process. You must allow the rest of the project to be included in your work. And this openness has unsettled us because—as students—we’ve previously found comfort in hiding our work; it’s like a form of self-protection because what cannot be seen cannot be judged.
Voice 2 (Olivia): Now, we would like to bring this episode to a close by sharing two anecdotes. The first, a narrative of negotiating conflict within our friendship and, the second, a heartfelt example of how we made our labour visible to Ann-Marie MacDonald.
Voice 1 (Emily): Well, in honour of sharing the “mess” of our praxis, we can share how our friendship has involved emotional difficulties throughout this work. You know, sometimes challenges arose from the care work involved in nurturing a feminist friendship; it can be exhausting to feel a sense of obligation to someone when you have limited personal capacities. But this aside, most of our emotional tensions developed as we worked-through discipline-based differences in perspective while co-producing work. You know, we’ve talked about how, while coding passages, you and I were able to consult one another as “experts” on categories derived from our disciplines.
Voice 2 (Olivia): Right. But, this changed when were writing the first draft of the conference paper – which would eventually become this very podcast episode – neither of us held the title of “expert,” so we had to negotiate our different perspectives. We asked questions like “how should a paper read?” and disagreed but hesitated to compromise – which largely stems from the fact that we each come from disciplines with different expectations of academic writing. Underneath this tension was a logic of ownership, the antithesis of our feminist praxis, that made us each protective of the paper as “mine,” not “yours.” It was a frustrating—even defeating—process that resulted in wasted time and relational tears.
Voice 1 (Emily): Absolutely. But, acknowledging our existence as embodied and emplaced beings allows us to understand that it’s impossible to avoid emotional tensions within our working and personal relationships; our experiences with the world are sometimes difficult, and therefore, we can become difficult people.
And it was interesting because, as we transformed the paper into an outline for this conversation, we were much more comfortable with collaboration and compromise.
Voice 2 (Olivia): In contrast to this description of confronting the difficulty of maintaining an ethics of care in the face of conflict, I’d like to end with the description of a joyful, though perhaps equally complicated narrative of MacDonald’s visit. She came to our campus in March to witness the work we have been doing with her novel, The Way the Crow Flies. During this visit, we discussed our data collection process before performing a live coding session with a passage from the book. For Emily, myself, and the rest of the team, this was a full-circle moment wherein we were able to demonstrate the complexities of our work to the author by whom we are attempting to do justice.
Voice 1 (Emily): But…while we were all honoured to show the person who produced our object of study the research we were conducting, we were also nervous. Scholars within each of our disciplines tend to produce knowledge in an isolated space. Olivia and I—like the rest of our team members—are defaulted to hide perceived failures; so, the prospect of presenting a work-in-progress to MacDonald was nothing short of uncomfortable.
Voice 2 (Olivia): However, the MAMM project’s embrace of this discomfort is seen in letting Ann Marie MacDonald into our actual process instead of just showing her the maps we made with the data we collected. We also give equal value to both our data collection tools and the maps we produce using the data collected. Emily, would you say we’re all just as proud of our Excel sheet full of data as we are of the maps we plotted?
Voice 1 (Emily): Absolutely. Our research is in no way detached from the author of our text nor from each other. So, that being said, we’ll continue this conversation next episode with the author herself, Ann-Marie MacDonald.
- Alternative: We’ll continue this conversation next episode with more team members.
Show Notes:
- SSHRC funded
- Link to Website for further info + to see the map
These are in alphabetical order, but I’m open to changing it (PI names first?):
- List the names of MAMM team members: Aaron Mauro, Dana Alrifai, Ebru Ustundag, Neta Gordon, Paige Baziuk, Reneé Colucci, Riley Campbell, Sloane Grey, Tim Ribaric
- List the names of pod team members: Alison Innes, Andrew Camacho
Brock’s Humanities Research Institute funded (mention that they funded Omeka portion of project)
English 
French