Convocation Speaker Kaitlynn Mendes Tuesday, June 11, 2024, 10:00 a.m.
For more than 15 years, Professor Mendes has studied how digital technologies shape, disrupt, and transform the gendered nature of political participation. This includes popular feminist campaigns such as #MeToo and SlutWalk. In recent years, she has become increasingly interested in what’s known as technology-facilitated sexual violence – an umbrella term that captures a wide range of harms such as non-consensual sharing of intimate images and the generation of deepfake porn. In doing this research, she has also been a vocal critic of how existing legal and educational policies fail to address the rise of trolling, harassment, and other forms of technology- facilitated sexual violence. Professor Mendes has spent considerable effort mobilizing academic knowledge and translating it to a broad range of stakeholders including school leaders, teachers, parents, young people, policy makers and law enforcement agents. Insights from her research have been used to inform policies, practices and public understanding on contemporary gender inequalities in Canada, Australia, the EU and UK. In 2023, policy guidance for schools that she co-developed was cited in a UK Department of Education government briefing, and she has recently advised the Justice Minister and Attorney General on Canada’s proposed Online Harms Bill. As a public academic, she has more than 80 media appearances and has been featured in The National, The Current, The Washington Post, The Toronto Star, the BBC and The New York Times , to name a few. With her current research, she aims to produce educational resources and policy guidance that will reach millions of people in years to come.
Kaitlynn Mendes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Western University and holds the Canada Research Chair in Inequality and Gender. She received a Bachelor of Journalism (2005) from Carleton University and her PhD in Journalism Studies from Cardiff University, UK (2009). She is a world-leading researcher renowned for her work on feminist activism, rape culture and the gendered dynamics of digital practices. Professor Mendes has authored three monographs, two edited collections, 13 policy documents, and nearly 60 outputs in top-tier journals or important edited collections. She has also delivered more than 60 international keynotes and/or invited addresses on the topics of feminism, activism, rape culture and social media in places such as China, India, Bangladesh, France, Portugal, Germany, Spain, Canada, the UK, and the US at world-leading institutions such as Cambridge University (UK), Fudan University (China), and Paris-Panthéon- Assas University (France).
323 rd Convocation 19
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