Kathryn Fedchun

Click here for CV.

Hi!

I am a 5th year PhD candidate at Carleton University in the School of Journalism and Communication. I completed my undergraduate degree at Queen’s University, majoring in sociology and minoring in philosophy. I became interested in crime and specifically violence against women, and upon graduating, moved to Toronto to complete a two-year diploma program at George Brown College to become an assaulted women’s and children’s counsellor & advocate (AWCCA). I spent a few years in Toronto working as a woman’s counsellor in women’s shelters and at a crisis helpline.

Then, I decided to move to Ottawa to pursue an MA in sociology with a specialization in feminist and gender studies at the University of Ottawa. During this degree, my interests expanded into the world of video games. My master’s thesis, A Feminist Autoethnography: On Hegemonic Masculinity, Failure, and Subversive Play in League of Legends, explores these elements through the lens of feminist and queer game studies. Since then, I have completed a comprehensive examination on affect theory, published a paper with Statistics Canada on Investigating the use of blockchain to authenticate data from the Statistics Canada website, written a piece in the book Showing theory to know theory: Understanding social science concepts through illustrative vignettes (2022) called May the force be with you: Illustrating affect through the force in Star Wars (with testimonial here).

I am a fellow at the Research on Comics, Con Events, and Transmedia Laboratory (RoCCET Lab). The lab, based in Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, is a hub for interdisciplinary social-science research on comic books and related media. Grounded in the critical tradition of communication studies but embracing theoretical and methodological approaches from across the humanities and social sciences, our research examines the changing relationships between producers, intermediaries, and audiences in the contemporary popular media industries.

I have been a RoCCET fellow since September 2020. In this role, I have:

• Co-presented at the Music and Gaming Festival (MAGfest) as part of the Music and Gaming Education Symposium (MAGES) programming track where we presented some of our research on fan convention’s harassment policies and lead participants through activities designed to help us envision safer, more inclusive fan events.
• Co-taught the Comics and Cartooning mini-course, where students between grades 8-10 dove into the history and cultural impact of comics, explored different styles and forms of comics, and ultimately created and showcased their own mini-comics and zines.
• Co-presented on our Convention Policies Project at the Canadian Communication Association in summer 2023. Our talk was on “Cosplay and Consent: Discourses of Harassment in Fan Convention Policies.”
• Co-published the Con Polizine, a zine about our convention policy research, in 2023.
• Participated in the Swarming SDCC project by attending and presenting “Policing the Con: SDCC‘s Policies in Context” at San Diego Comic Con in summer 2022.

I live in Ottawa with my partner Colin and our rescue dog Chris.