The alt solves for racism, white-supremacy, imperialism, misogyny, and queerphobia.

Conclusion: Thinking, talking, and making feminist shadow networks

In her post on “Selfcare as Warfare” on her blog feministkilljoys, Sara Ahmed writes, “even if it’s a system change we need, that we fight for, when the system does not change, when the walls come up, those hardenings of history into physical barriers in the present, you have to manage; to cope” (Ahmed 2014, para. 28). At its core, this is what qLab and FTT seek to offer: a space for not only managing and coping when the university is banging down our doors, but a space that also affirms and validates the research we need to do to find meaning and to, hopefully, help others find meaning; a space for solidarity, wherein solidarity becomes a method for anti-racism and for fighting white supremacy and imperialism; solidarity as a tactic for opposing misogyny and trans and queerphobia. Solidarity is also what drives feminist shadow networks. It is what enables us as feminists to highlight that which resists—because we’ve fostered solidarity, mutual support, and care. But that solidarity must be grounded in intersectional feminism to resist its tokenization and the over-reliance on white feminism that relies on a binary focus on gender to the neglect of other intersecting systems of oppression.

In THINKING, we sought to lay this out as we reflected on feminist relationality, un-thinking mastery, and critical friendship as guiding orientations for qLab and FTT. In TALKING, we shared how FTT approaches research collaborations, analysis (both of our research and of the university and lab spaces around us), and our lab communities as they reflect our epistemologies of un-learning and care. In MAKING, we described our recent data jams and our long-standing Instagram project, which reflect our ethos of feminist relationality. Throughout our reflections on thinking and talking, we hope to have highlighted how we, ultimately, work to share labour to make space for the kind of research that we care about through the formation of our own feminist shadow networks. We do the labour together, supporting through care, critical friendship, cultivating trust, and advocating for slow scholarship as we strive for equality of relationships. We labour to work as equals, learning from the different kinds of work that we each do to appreciate the mutual respect and dignity that comes from different kinds of labour and work. As nodes within our own feminist shadow networks, we see the process as just as important as this work and we value difference, trusting that we will be different from one another and that we should support each other where we diverge and celebrate where we come together. The qCollaborative and Feminist Think Tank continue to endeavour to maintain the ethos we have outlined here.

Feminist work, DH work, and feminist digital activism are all places where we can oppose existing social relations and discursive systems that never wanted us there to begin with. For us, a key aspect of that opposition is to determine alterative, more careful and critical ways of being with the labyrinths of research, data, technological affordances, and feminist histories via our feminist shadow networks. In doing so, we can refuse the de facto definitions and values given to these dominant stories within the academy to, instead, question and name the very real violence such values and designs have on our social and personal worlds. In doing so, we can refuse to let our research, data, and histories be set apart from the inequities of life, so that we can revel in the networks of care that our feminist shadow networks bring to our everyday lives as researchers, activists, and members of communities and let them guide us as we think, talk, and make together in pursuit of our preferred feminist futures.