Book Talk: Q&A with a scholar on how everyday objects help fight gender-based violence

Nicolette Little’s From Red Dresses to Memory Stones: Multimedia Activism and Gender-Based Violence in Canada looks at five projects — the REDress Project, the Disposable Red Woman, the digital memorialization of the Montréal Massacre , the documentary Slut or Nut and the Memory Stones Project — that Canadian activists have used to confront gender-based violence and spread awareness.

In this Q&A, the media and technology scholar talks about what she found in interviews with the people behind that activism and what it tells us about grief, protest and collective remembering.

The Conversation Canada: You cover five different multimedia projects.

What drew you to them specifically? Nicolette Little: They really hadn’t been studied before.

The only one that had been explored was Jamie Black’s REDress Project , and even then, it was so minimally explored (and not in the media studies field) that it was kind of shocking.

But more importantly, they were very clearly resonating with a lot of different people across Canada.

The REDress Project was inspiring a ton of what we call “copycat projects.” Disposable Red Woman inspired newspaper articles.

It was shock art that just stopped people in their tracks.

The Memory Stones Project impacted tens of thousands of people around the world.

They were understudied, but they’d had such incredible cultural impact in the conversation about gender-based violence in Canada.

TCC: How do you prioritize consent and the well-being of your sources when you’re covering topics that are both serious and traumatic? NL: I was doing interviews with people who often had experience of gender-based violence, whether themselves or a loved one.

They were what I call “sensitive interviews,” and being trauma-informed was really important.

This is a term that gets thrown around a whole ton.

It’s assuming from the get-go that people probably have some challenging experiences in the past, and treading carefully.