The Production Of Presence: How Women Of Colour Transmute Online Activities Into Offline Change

This dissertation project explores the intersections of and interactions between virtual and material spaces as studied through the online activities of women of colour social justice activists in Toronto. Internet technologies and services have reshaped everyday urban life, and the growing availability of devices and access to online spaces and networks are changing how we engage with the city. In this dissertation, I examine how the internet facilitates access to the right to the city for racialized and gendered individuals who may have been excluded from city-building processes. Using a mixed methods approach, I combine participant interviews with digital archival research; I also use mainstream media coverage as a secondary data source to provide verification and reinforce my findings. Through what I term “the production of presence,” I investigate the relationships between online user-generated content and its effects on offline lives, spaces, and processes. First, I describe the how women of colour social justice activists in Toronto use their online activities to access their right to the city, extending this to include the right to represent the city. I look at the characteristics of virtual spaces that uniquely enable and facilitate different ways of being in urban spaces. Second, I apply an object-oriented framework to user-generated content to examine the how this data has the agency to both produce presence that extends beyond the tokenism of visibility politics, and to organise readers into audience, publics, or communities. Examining user-generated content as object reveals the agency of data and raises questions about the ethics of accessing and using user-generated content in professional practice, which I explore in further depth in the third paper of this dissertation. In this final paper, I look at planning and journalism as two professions involved in shaping and representing the city, and I examine how the online personal archives of women of colour social justice activists can be accessed to inform reporting on and designing the city.Ph.D