Leslie Regan Shade
Biographic Data
| ID | 119330 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Leslie Regan Shade |
| GIVEN NAMES | Leslie Regan |
| FAMILY NAME | Shade |
| SIGNATURE | SHADE L R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3440-3222 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Policy Portal 5: Intersectionality and Inclusion in Digital Policy: Policy Processes, Interventions, and Reflections
Policy Portal 5: Intersectionality and Inclusion in Digital Policy: Intersectional Critiques of AI Governance
Revisiting Governmentality: Collapsing Information Silos and Emerging Biopolitical Economies of Circulation
Background: In 1977–78, Foucault outlined the theory of “governmentality,” which accounts for how populations are secured in milieus of circulation. For Foucault, security involves tapping into political economy and engaging apparatuses of security to ensure freedom of movement. Analysis: This article examines collapsing governmental and commercial information silos and presents two brief case studies (automated license plate readers and abortion…
What Hath Dobbs Wrought? Abortion activism in precarious and punitive times
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), abolishing the constitutional right to abortion. Significant in its radical criminalization of abortion, Dobbs reinvigorated feminist activism for reproductive justice. Digital and mobile technologies are used in innovative ways by activists to organize, educate, and dispel counter-narratives about abortion, including feminis…
Introduction Policy Portal 4: Regulation
Regulation of communication infr astructures, resources, and dominant digital platforms is an increasingly pressing and provocative matter.Numerous government initiatives in Canada, the United States, and the European Union are currently deliberating various modes of regulation along several vectors, including: anti-trust law to break up the monopoly power of "big tech"; development of robust and actionable data privacy enforcement; content moder…
Introduction: Policy Portal 4: Regulation
This is the second issue in a two-part series of the Policy Portal on the theme of regulation.In the first issue, 48.1, four articles addressed an array of regulatory issues including current initiatives in Canadian broadcasting and telecommunication policy, privacy and facial recognition technologies, and children's digital games.This second issue consists of five articles that discuss regulation in Canadian telecommunications, including broadba…
Citizenship in a Connected Canada: A Research and Policy Agenda
Every Click You Make: Algorithmic Literacy and the Digital Lives of Young Adults
Critical digital literacy comprises subsets of medium- and content-related skills necessary for digital privacy and digital citizenship. Frameworks for defining and evaluating digital literacy proliferate in academia and policymaking; however, in a networked climate subsumed by dataveillance, algorithmic bias, political bots, and deep fakes, these frameworks need to be updated. Algorithms may be the greatest determinant in sociopolitical online i…
Platforms and Power: A Panel Discussion
Background This article is based on a panel discussion at McMaster University in 2019. Analysis Five questions are posed: 1) What is pressing about research on platforms and power right now? 2) What is the most powerful example of a research design that could disrupt or transform platform power? 3) Can platforms and algorithms be liberating? 4) How can researchers and policymakers work together for change? 5) What regulatory futures should resear…
Canadian Digital and Data Strategy
Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice
Getting at Equality: Research Methods Informed by the Lessons of Intersectionality
This article evaluates a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach with mixed methods including concept mapping, q-sorting and deliberative dialogue in the context of a research project on young people's experiences with digital communications technologies, and addresses some of the central insights of intersectionality theory and praxis. Our approach seeks to ensure that, insofar as possible, the gathered data provide a rich and layered windo…
Hop to it in the gig economy: The sharing economy and neo-liberal feminism
This article examines two major sharing economy companies, Uber and TaskRabbit, describing how they comprise virtual work and articulate gendered relations through their promotional discourse and initiatives. By encouraging the empowering benefits of labour flexibility and entrepreneurialism for women, these companies exemplify a type of neo-liberal feminism, which endorses individualization and market-based solutions to employment. Given the con…
Children's digital playgrounds as data assemblages: Problematics of privacy, personalization, and promotional culture
Children's digital playgrounds have evolved from commercialized digital spaces such as websites and games to include an array of convergent digital media consisting of social media platforms, mobile apps, and the internet of toys. In these digital spaces, children's data is shared with companies for analytics, personalization, and advertising. This article describes children's digital playgrounds as a data assemblage involving commercial surveill…
Activism and Communication Scholarship in Canada
Activism and Communication Pedagogy: A Conversation with Becky Lentz and Mark Lipton
Integrating Gender into Canadian Internet Policy: From the Information Highway to the Digital Economy
This article provides an overview of gender and Internet policy in Canada from the mid-1990s to the present day. It first traces early federal policy (Fourth World Conference on Women, federal plan for gender equality, and the Information Highway Advisory Council [IHAC]). Turning to the 2000s, the article reviews Canada's influence in international initiatives (World Summit on the Information Society). The article then reviews Conservative govern…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Gendering Global Media Policy: Critical Perspectives on “Digital Agendas”
Twenty years have passed since the international community committed to foster gender equity in communication by increasing “the participation and access of women to expression and decision-making in and through the media and new technologies of communication” (Beijing 1995, Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Section J).1 Much work remains to improve persistent gender inequalities across societies and to address major tr…
Low power to the people: Pirates, protest, and politics in FM radio activism
At an evening keynote at the 5th National Conference for Media Reform in 2011, a group of colourfully clad people appeared on stage wielding hula hoops, expertly and adroitly twirling and spinning
Sexting panic: Rethinking criminalization, privacy, and consent
Honestly, We're Not Spying on Kids: School Surveillance of Young People's Social Media
Social media is one of the top activities and sites for young people's socialization in North America, raising concerns over their social privacy, because of reported instances of cyberbullying and sexting, and their informational privacy, because of commercial data collection. A trend in schools and school districts in the United States is to monitor and track, through third party applications and software, student social media during and after …
Hungry for the Job: Gender, Unpaid Internships, and the Creative Industries
This paper examines the experiences of young Canadian women working in Toronto and New York who have undertaken unpaid internships in the creative sector. Interviews focused on their internship experiences, ability to secure paid employment, knowledge of the legal status of unpaid internships, and familiarity with emergent activism against unpaid internships. Findings reinforce the class-based privilege of unpaid internships in the creative secto…
My So-Called Social Media Life
This short essay offers a personal reflection on social media and some of the challenges related to corporate ownership and policy issues of privacy and surveillance
Missing in Action: Gender in Canada’s Digital Economy Agenda
This article considers the fate of gender analyses and gender-specific policy in Canadian information and communication technology (ICT) policy. Following a proactive and progressive period in the 1990s, during which federal programs and policies recognized the need for gender equity in the nascent information highway, the mid-2000s saw a diminishment of gender equity provisions across all areas of government policy. While the current Progressive…
Give us bread, but give us roses’: Gender and labour in the digital economy
This article provides an overview of contemporary scholarship in information and communication studies on labour and gender in the digital economy. It also discusses recent feminist perspectives on social media attributes around labour, including the paucity of women working in the social media industry, and the gendered dimension of young unpaid interns. Control of the means of communication and production is a dominant and perturbing theme thro…
Feminizing the Mobile: Gender Scripting of Mobiles in North America
A lively body of feminist research has examined how communication technologies have been gendered through their social uses—often unintended—and their design (Chabaud-Rychter, 1994; Cowan, 1985; Ho
Hungry for the Job: Gender, Unpaid Internships, and the Creative Industries
This paper examines the experiences of young Canadian women working in Toronto and New York who have undertaken unpaid internships in the creative sector. Interviews focused on their internship experiences, ability to secure paid employment, knowledge of the legal status of unpaid internships, and familiarity with emergent activism against unpaid internships. Findings reinforce the class-based privilege of unpaid internships in the creative secto…
Getting at Equality: Research Methods Informed by the Lessons of Intersectionality
This article evaluates a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach with mixed methods including concept mapping, q-sorting and deliberative dialogue in the context of a research project on young people's experiences with digital communications technologies, and addresses some of the central insights of intersectionality theory and praxis. Our approach seeks to ensure that, insofar as possible, the gathered data provide a rich and layered windo…
Hop to it in the gig economy: The sharing economy and neo-liberal feminism
This article examines two major sharing economy companies, Uber and TaskRabbit, describing how they comprise virtual work and articulate gendered relations through their promotional discourse and initiatives. By encouraging the empowering benefits of labour flexibility and entrepreneurialism for women, these companies exemplify a type of neo-liberal feminism, which endorses individualization and market-based solutions to employment. Given the con…
Neopian economics of play: Children's cyberpets and online communities as immersive advertising in NeoPets.com
This article examines NeoPets, an online community for children where members create or adopt a virtual pet. The NeoPets Corporation is examined, with attention paid to their practice of ‘immersive advertising’ amidst concerns over the increasing commercialization and branding of children's web-based content and culture. Ethical issues explored include privacy and intellectual property
Children's digital playgrounds as data assemblages: Problematics of privacy, personalization, and promotional culture
Children's digital playgrounds have evolved from commercialized digital spaces such as websites and games to include an array of convergent digital media consisting of social media platforms, mobile apps, and the internet of toys. In these digital spaces, children's data is shared with companies for analytics, personalization, and advertising. This article describes children's digital playgrounds as a data assemblage involving commercial surveill…
Honestly, We're Not Spying on Kids: School Surveillance of Young People's Social Media
Social media is one of the top activities and sites for young people's socialization in North America, raising concerns over their social privacy, because of reported instances of cyberbullying and sexting, and their informational privacy, because of commercial data collection. A trend in schools and school districts in the United States is to monitor and track, through third party applications and software, student social media during and after …
Give us bread, but give us roses’: Gender and labour in the digital economy
This article provides an overview of contemporary scholarship in information and communication studies on labour and gender in the digital economy. It also discusses recent feminist perspectives on social media attributes around labour, including the paucity of women working in the social media industry, and the gendered dimension of young unpaid interns. Control of the means of communication and production is a dominant and perturbing theme thro…
Commentary and Criticism
Wanted, Alive and Kicking: Curious feminist digital policy geeks
In 2008 Katharine Sarikakis and I co-edited Feminist Interventions in International Communication. The collection offered a refreshing range of feminist scholarship unabashedly championing a politi
Here Comes the Dot Force: The New Cavalry for Equity
This article examines the DOT Force, a G8 initiative that aims to bridge the digital divide in developing countries. The DOT Force, announced in Summer 2000, has culminated in a set of recommendations released at the G8 meeting in Genoa in 2001. After a brief overview of the DOT Force objectives and the `Genoa Plan of Action', this article looks at the role of ICTs in development, the role of the World Trade Organization in fostering telecommunic…
A Gendered Perspective on Access to the Information Infrastructure
This article provides a gendered perspective on access to the emerging information infrastructure. It examines access issues as they affect women; discusses public policy work on gender equity to national information infrastructure initiatives; and provides recommended reforms towards increasing gender equity to the information infrastructure
Women and Television
Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 3, May 1993
Computer Networking in Canada: From CA*net to Canarie
This paper will discuss the current status of computer networking in Canada, from the establishment of CA*net in the late 1980s, to current plans to upgrade its networking capabilities through the implementation of CANARIE (the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education). A preliminary overview of the Internet, the multitude of computer networks that are linked together internationally, will situate Canadian networki…
Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture
Women, Work and Computerization: Manchester, 2-5 July 1994
Fast Lane: Canadian Top Executives on the Information Highway and Other Issues
Developing guidelines within the Canadian “knowledge-based economy/society”
The rhetoric surrounding the creation of a 'knowledge-based economy/society' (KBE/S) emphasizes the interrelationship between ICTs (information and communication technologies) in knowledge and economic development and their continued trajectory throughout the next century. What, however, is really meant by the KBE/S agenda, and how are the important social issues surrounding KBE/S, including access, content, and citizenship being dealt with? Usin…
A Gendered Perspective on Access to the Information Infrastructure
This article provides a gendered perspective on access to the emerging information infrastructure. It examines access issues as they affect women; discusses public policy work on gender equity to national information infrastructure initiatives; and provides recommended reforms towards increasing gender equity to the information infrastructure
"Just add girls and stir? [review of "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: ["Gender and Computer Games"]
Weborexics: The Ethical Issues Surrounding Pro-Ana Websites
Pro-Ana's are young women who proclaim themselves to be proudly anorexic, and they have created a vibrant community online. This article will examine the nature of the Pro-Ana sites, analyzing their discursive community, and discuss the ethical issues surrounding the sites, wherein many have been censured or shut down by commercial website hosting sites, which has raised issues of censorship versus freedom of speech
Here Comes the Dot Force: The New Cavalry for Equity
This article examines the DOT Force, a G8 initiative that aims to bridge the digital divide in developing countries. The DOT Force, announced in Summer 2000, has culminated in a set of recommendations released at the G8 meeting in Genoa in 2001. After a brief overview of the DOT Force objectives and the `Genoa Plan of Action', this article looks at the role of ICTs in development, the role of the World Trade Organization in fostering telecommunic…
Pinhead politics? Fox News versus the Canadian regulators
Typically, the New York Times isn’t strong on presenting Canadian news to its readers - unlike the Canadian counterpart, The Globe and Mail , which features a daily diet of American news - politics and entertainment. In the last year the New York Times ’s Canadian-focused articles included topics such as antismoking legislation in Nunavut, potential terrorist ties to Canada, acrimonious debates over border safety, the travails of ageing boomers a…
Neopian economics of play: Children's cyberpets and online communities as immersive advertising in NeoPets.com
This article examines NeoPets, an online community for children where members create or adopt a virtual pet. The NeoPets Corporation is examined, with attention paid to their practice of ‘immersive advertising’ amidst concerns over the increasing commercialization and branding of children's web-based content and culture. Ethical issues explored include privacy and intellectual property
You can see anything on the Internet, you can do anything on the Internet!”: Young Canadians Talk about the Internet
This paper presents emerging findings based on 35 semi-structured interviews conducted with children and youth from the research project Children, Young People, and New Media in the Home. The objective of this research is to examine young people’s use of the Internet by focusing on the overall media environment at home. Our study indicates that while children and young people are active and intrepid Internet surfers, they use the Internet to exte…
Commentary Net Neutrality: Telecom Policy and the Public Interest
What is net neutrality? The debate about the shape of the Internet is being held behind closed doors, led by government and industry with little public input. This article examines net neutrality and the stakeholders in this emerging national debate. The authors discuss the legislative and policy implications, while at the same time exploring alternative models for achieving broadly accessible, affordable high-speed Internet access
Feminizing the Mobile: Gender Scripting of Mobiles in North America
A lively body of feminist research has examined how communication technologies have been gendered through their social uses—often unintended—and their design (Chabaud-Rychter, 1994; Cowan, 1985; Ho
Reconsidering the Right to Privacy in Canada
This article argues that post—September 11 political debates and legislation around security necessitate a reconsideration of a right to privacy in Canada. It looks at the proposal for a Canadian Charter of Privacy Rights promoted by Senator Sheila Finestone in the late 1990s and the current challenges of emergent material technologies accelerated by digitization and political technologies of regulation and governance
Commentary and Criticism
Democratizing Communication Policy in the Americas: Why It Matters
Democratizing Communication Policy in the Americas: Why It MattersC ommunication policy is an important but often overlooked topic-a blind spot- in much social policy research and public discourse except when issues such as child protection online or peace and security seem to be concerned.Other front-page issues such as climate change, illegal immigration, corporate bailouts, human trafficking, genocide, or public health crises are presented as …
Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
Wanted, Alive and Kicking: Curious feminist digital policy geeks
In 2008 Katharine Sarikakis and I co-edited Feminist Interventions in International Communication. The collection offered a refreshing range of feminist scholarship unabashedly championing a politi
Viewing youth and mobile privacy through a digital policy literacy framework
Digital policy literacy is a critical element of digital literacy that emphasizes an understanding of communication policy processes, the political economy of media, and technological infrastructures. This paper introduces an analytical framework of digital policy literacy and applies it to young people’s everyday negotiations of mobile privacy, in order to argue for increased policy literacy around privacy and mobile phone communication. The fra…
Missing in Action: Gender in Canada’s Digital Economy Agenda
This article considers the fate of gender analyses and gender-specific policy in Canadian information and communication technology (ICT) policy. Following a proactive and progressive period in the 1990s, during which federal programs and policies recognized the need for gender equity in the nascent information highway, the mid-2000s saw a diminishment of gender equity provisions across all areas of government policy. While the current Progressive…
Give us bread, but give us roses’: Gender and labour in the digital economy
This article provides an overview of contemporary scholarship in information and communication studies on labour and gender in the digital economy. It also discusses recent feminist perspectives on social media attributes around labour, including the paucity of women working in the social media industry, and the gendered dimension of young unpaid interns. Control of the means of communication and production is a dominant and perturbing theme thro…
Hungry for the Job: Gender, Unpaid Internships, and the Creative Industries
This paper examines the experiences of young Canadian women working in Toronto and New York who have undertaken unpaid internships in the creative sector. Interviews focused on their internship experiences, ability to secure paid employment, knowledge of the legal status of unpaid internships, and familiarity with emergent activism against unpaid internships. Findings reinforce the class-based privilege of unpaid internships in the creative secto…
My So-Called Social Media Life
This short essay offers a personal reflection on social media and some of the challenges related to corporate ownership and policy issues of privacy and surveillance
Political science (33 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Law (21 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Public relations (17 works) · Business (16 works) · Engineering (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Economics (11 works) · Politics (10 works)