Projects

This research, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative Grant (936-2021-00275) to Veletsianos, Hodson, Gosse, and Mendes,  seeks to understand how men think about gender-based online abuse, what types of behaviours they recognize as gender-based online abuse, and what role men believe they play in preventing and mitigating such abuse. In partnership with Anova, the ultimate aim of this project is to develop educational programming to:

1) increase men’s awareness and knowledge of gender-based online abuse and 2) teach practical, proactive bystander intervention techniques to empower men to act against gender-based online abuse.

The first stage of our project involved interviewing men who have witnessed gender-based online abuse to learn about how men conceptualize this topic. Insights gained from these interviews will be used to design a nationally-representative survey asking men across Canada about their thoughts on gender-based online abuse.  In stage two, we analyze existing bystander intervention training programs to examine whether and how they address gender-based online abuse, as well as interview key personnel at organizations offering these programs in order to understand their content, pedagogical approaches, and intended outcomes. Stage three incorporates all the data and insight from the previous two stages into the development and assessment, in conjunction with Anova and other partners, of gender-based online abuse awareness programming and online bystander intervention training for men.

Across Canada, there is increasing awareness of the harms caused by technology-facilitated gender-based violence and abuse (TFGBVA), and the urgent need for community education that helps people safely intervene when they witness harm and violence. While bystander intervention (BI) programs have been widely implemented in face-to-face settings, community organizations lack practical, evidence-informed tools for addressing harassment, image-based abuse, doxxing and cyberstalking that unfold across digital platforms. This SSHRC Connection Grant-supported national workshop series brings together BI practitioners, gender-justice advocates, community organizations, and academic researchers to co-develop shareable toolkits. These toolkits will offer guidance on intersectional design, trauma- and violence-informed practice, and interactive learning strategies for digital and hybrid BI training. All resources will be openly available through Pressbooks and hosted by the Digital Public Interest Collective website, ensuring broad access for community organizations across Canada. Practitioners, educators, Universities’  EDI offices, HR departments, and anti-violence organizations will be able to use these materials to strengthen online training and support community responses to violence and abuse. 

This SSHRC-funded project examines the impact of online harassment on scholars and science communicators, exploring how organizational policies can better support researchers and taking an intersectional approach to understanding how identity shapes harassment experiences.

For this SSHRC-funded research project, we conducted a scoping review of the literature to understand how to support knowledge workers who are impacted by online abuse. We developed a toolkit for managers, a podcast, a report, and also presented our work through conferences and webinars.

This research, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant (430-2017-00104) to Veletsianos and Hodson, examined the types of online harassment faced by women academics, the strategies and supports these women employed to cope with abuse, and the adverse impacts such harassment had on their personal and professional lives.

The first stage of our project involved interviewing women scholars who self-identified as having experiences with online harassment as a result of their scholarly activities. Out of that data we have published two articles. In the second stage of our research, we have analyzed data collected from a survey of academics’ experiences with online harassment and published two more articles.

Combining qualitative and quantitative methods with feminist analysis, our research aims to make sense of online abuse targeted towards academics, and to aid in policy and strategy development at varied levels, from the individual as both researcher and instructor, to the institutions, and to the platforms and the networks they afford, as well as governments.

As digital technologies become an inescapable element of the lives of citizens across the world, they have also become spaces where users regularly encounter, experience, and make sense of violence. Indeed, users of digital platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram frequently experience harassment, hate speech, and vitriol. However, while violence on digital platforms has become an issue of global concern, more attention should be paid to the multiple ways online harms shape and are shaped by culture. In this context, it is essential to understand how countries with different cultures result in distinct inhabitations of harm on digital platforms.

Accordingly, this knowledge synthesis project explores how violence on digital platforms is shaped by and can shape culture. To achieve this, we systematically reviewed available literature concerning the topic of this project in the context of three settings: Canada, Iran, and Colombia. These three countries were ideally suited to a revision of this nature due to their distinct connection to violence, both online and offline. Indeed, foregrounding these three countries provides a valuable and critical source of information on whether, how, and to what extent cultural contexts contribute to nuances in how citizens experience platformed violence.

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For this SSHRC-funded research project, we are bringing together scholars from a variety of transdisciplinary backgrounds in order to understand how different disciplines can contribute to an understanding of why misinformation travels the ways that it does. This project will result in the second podcast series produced by our collective

Online harassment and abuse constitute a significant barrier to research communication. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is becoming a more prevalent and consistent concern for researchers across sectors, from academia, to government, and industry, and a growing body of evidence suggests that research communicators from equity-deserving groups are disproportionately targeted and affected.  With these concerns in mind, this Insight Development Grant-funded project, lead by Dr. George Veletsianos and Dr. Jaigris Hodson, examines the needs for support of researchers and scholars who have been targeted with online abuse in the context of doing their work, as well as the extent to which institutions are prepared to protect and support their faculty and staff in the event of an online attack. Prioritizing the experiences of equity-deserving researchers and employing intersectional feminist analyses, this ongoing project’s objective is to assess and make recommendations for institutions to improve support for their faculty and staff.

In collaboration with the Social Media Lab, this project examines how Telegram enables anti-social behaviour through two case studies: the spread of medical misinformation and conspiracy theories in US-based groups, and the role of violence in sustaining social networks in Colombia.

For this CIHR-funded research project, we partnered with Ryerson’s social media lab to understand trends on COVID-19 misinformation and ways that microlearning interventions could potentially help to better deliver important public health information to the people who need it.