Led by Lena Hübner, assistant professor in the Department of Communication, this project examines racialized and gender-based violence. It focuses on racialized women from minority communities, in particular Franco-Ontarian communities. Professor Hübner plans to study how these women cope with forms of linguistic, technology-facilitated and media violence that hamper their access to information. She will also document the strategies they use for resistance.
The project is a continuation of Hübner’s doctoral and postdoctoral research, for which she requested a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant in February 2025. While studying how low-income Quebecers gathered information online and how women interacted with online media, she noticed something strange: many women who weren’t involved in feminist activism seemed to see cyberviolence as an unavoidable fact of life on the Internet, a reality they just had to accept. This attitude got her thinking, and she decided to take a closer look at it.
Hübner notes that existing research on cyberviolence has mainly focused on English Canada and France. Very few studies have been done on racialized and migrant Francophone women in French Canada. This gap in the literature motivated her to perform a comparative study in which she conducted interviews to discover how Quebec and Franco-Ontarian women gather information online. The results of this study revealed dramatic differences: while Quebec women had easy access to information online, Franco-Ontarian women often relied on international and even English-language news because they felt Quebec-based news was too Quebec-centric and often failed to cover issues specific to Ontario.
This pilot project was supported with seed funding from the Faculty of Arts and the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, in 2023. With this funding, Hübner developed an innovative digital exhibition (in French only) to raise public awareness about these issues. Fulfilling her desire to share her research in a public, interactive, easy-to-understand format, this tool brings together narrative, audio and visual content to reach a wide audience, including people with lower levels of education. She also uses the exhibition to spur conversations in discussion groups. This artistic, participatory project served as the cornerstone of Hübner’s recent SSHRC application for just that reason: it helps to open a dialogue, spark reflection and build on the research results.
Hübner says that over the past two years, she has found it especially rewarding to collaborate with her research assistants: three undergraduate students (one of whom has aspirations to pursue a master’s) and one master’s student. These students have played a vital role in sharing invitations to discussion groups, producing podcasts, finding relevant artwork and creating the website’s visual identity. The project provided valuable experience for each of their resumés.
By studying racialized and gender-based violence in online news consumption, Hübner hopes to help deconstruct stereotypes and bring the knowledge she learned to a broader audience. Her project promises to be a powerful tool for exploring the unique challenges that racialized Franco-Ontarian women face as they seek information. It also holds hope for change in the way violence in this sphere is seen and talked about publicly.