Did online rhetoric lead to violence in the classroom?

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Jordan Heath Rawlings Here are the basics of what we know so far. On June 28th, last Wednesday, Waterloo Regional Police say that a 24 year old man entered Hagey Hall at the University of Waterloo and attacked a philosophy class that was related to studying gender. Three people were stabbed during that attack, the teacher and two students, and to the eyewitnesses as well as to the police, who later called it hate motivated. The motive was pretty clear too. One eyewitness reported that the attacker asked the professor for the subject of the class before smiling, pulling out a knife and attacking. In the wake of the attack there have been many questions and condemnations, but the important ones are these. Why did this happen? What makes a philosophy class about gender issues a target for violence? The answer to both those questions might be the same answer.

I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Dr. Shana MacDonald is an associate professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, where the incident last week took place. She wrote about that incident, but more importantly, the rhetoric that led to it, in The Conversation. Hello, Shana?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Hi

Jordan Heath Rawlings I just wanna start by asking, you know, how are you and the community doing in, in the aftermath of this attack?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Yeah, I think a lot of people took the weekend to just kind of regroup, and rest and do whatever care they could to kind of get ready for the week ahead and any kind of organizing we now have to face going forward.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I ran through the basic facts of this case just so everybody would understand what we’re discussing here in the introduction. But I wanted to get at it from your point of view. Maybe you could take us through the basics as you experienced them. What happened at Waterloo last Wednesday? What was it like?

Dr. Shana MacDonald So I think that, you know, it was startling for a lot of us because we were in the middle of summer term and it was just an everyday kind of Wednesday. And I had just happened to text my research assistant and for just a random question, and she’s like, do you know what’s happening right now? And she was actually in lockdown in a building adjacent to the one where the attack had occurred. And so this kind of became a moment when a lot of us, I think, began to mobilize in our sort of unofficial channels and began to share information. And so from our perspective, I think the attack was fairly quick. The response by the first responders was really quick. And then I think it was a matter of trying to piece together the incidents and you know, within that beginning to hear, oh, it was a gender class. And then for those of us who teach and research in this area begin to go, do we know who it is? Is it one of our colleagues? And you know, obviously it was. So, it was this very internal back channel conversation happening, I think for a lot of people at the university at that moment.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When you say those of us who teach these subjects, what’s it like teaching these kind of subjects with all the discussion and rhetoric that is out there about gender expression, et cetera, et cetera?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Well, I mean, for the most part it’s actually really joyful and pleasant and we have a really wonderful student body, who are eager to have these conversations, especially if they find their way to a topics course that has gender as a kind of central focus. And so, you know, in my ten years at the university, it’s never been contentious or contested, but just a very open dialogue. So I think that’s what makes this all the more distressing for us to, to witness and, and kind of where it leaves us. As those who teach these things.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What about during and after the incident, the communications from the university? I know there have been some questions about that. What kind of guidance did you guys get and and what’s it been like in the aftermath? I know it’s been a long weekend. Did the university just go away? What kind of help you getting?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Yeah, so I think in the, in the moment of the attack, the information from the university was quite uncoordinated and it felt disconnected. And that’s why those back channels were happening is because we were all trying to figure out what was going on. And so nothing official was really coming as quickly as I think any of us had hoped. Now, within 24 hours, we had very clear statements, a quick organization of public gathering where the president of the university spoke. And I think from that point on, set a tone that was very supportive and productive, to be honest, which you don’t always expect, but I think it was happy and very welcome. And so I think the most important thing within the communication we’ve had in the last couple of days is that the president has named this as an act of hate. And has given us the opportunity then to have those really necessary conversations. I don’t think that institutions always name things in these ways, but the fact that it was named as significant, the communications we’re getting starting from today onwards. So yeah, the university was quiet over the weekend, is that things are moving forward. There are meetings happening, there are conversations going on, and then there’s this attempt at transparency and never in any of this conversation has the fact that this is a traumatizing and distressing event for the community that’s always at the fore, and it’s always naming it in a, in a question of hate and attack. And I really, I actually really appreciate that from the university.

Jordan Heath Rawlings You said that discussing these issues can be really open and joyful in a university setting. And you know, I’m really glad to hear that aside from this hopefully isolated incident, that that is the case. You wrote a piece for the conversation that talks about the way we discuss these things not inside of a university setting. How is the language around these issues changing over the past, I don’t know what couple of years?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Yeah, I think it’s a great question because I’m seeing some pretty startling trends. So I’m someone who studies how we talk about gender in social media and internet contexts. And you know, one of the things that we know is that starting in around between 2012 and 2014, we began to see this, this, swelling up of a very productive conversation around feminism that would’ve hit its peak probably between 2014 and maybe 2018 with things like Me Too and, and all those conversations that we’re, we’re taking over, hashtag activism at the moment. What I think we’re in now is a backlash, and I’ve seen the, the kind of troubling trends of this for a while, and the reality is that while we’ve been having really great conversations about feminism in the public sphere or in public spaces for, you know, at least 8 to 10 years. We’re seeing this absolute continuing concurrence parallel hatred of feminism and women always there kind of at the fore. So it’s, it’s a bit of a contested field, but recently I think it’s gotten a lot worse. And I think that the internet obviously has a lot to do with this because of the lack of regulation around these conversations. It’s not just about kind of anti-woman misogynist, anti-feminist conversations. Obviously these are things that we’re seeing with, you know, rising forms of hatred that are Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, racist. You know, we’re seeing it in a lot of different ways, but yeah, I’d say in the last probably two to three years, it’s gotten particularly startling the ways in which people like Andrew Tate are being platformed and you know, having a huge impact on the way in which gender is being discussed. At the same time, you have this rising wave of conservatism that is having a lot of impact on the kinds of laws and policies that are being repealed, particularly south of the border. And so I’m, I’m quite alarmed by what the conversation looks like in public spaces.

Jordan Heath Rawlings We wanted to talk to, you because of the piece you wrote, but also because it seemed like you were somebody who could give us a perspective on how this evolves from supportive to a debate, to incendiary, to rhetoric, and ultimately to what happened last week. And maybe you could just start that process by defining stochastic terrorism for us. How does that apply?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Yeah, so stochastic terrorism is a way of describing the public demonization of a group to incite violence. And so I think that really key there is these two kind of connected ideas that it is in the public. This is not things that are being discussed in private, in the, in the kind of spaces of your own home or your own smaller communities, but they’re very public assertions that are spreading hatred, distrust, and the othering of some kind of group that you want to exclude or set apart from the larger kind of population. And they do it through, and it’s done through a demonization. And so, you know, that can be something as simple as in say, men’s rights groups in say four chan or other places online. The kind of popular conversation around feminism as cancer, right? So when we use a word like feminism as cancer, we’re talking about this kind of really reviled thing. Cancer, which destroys and destroys lives, and we’re attaching it to a group of people who have a certain type of beliefs. And in doing so, we can both separate ourselves. There’s a sense of superiority or some kind of, you know, way in which there’s a hierarchy being established and in that we can incite, you know, these kind of emotional states of anger, of fear. And in doing so, it makes it a lot easier to get towards either violence online. So saying really, really abusive, aggressive, and violent things. But when those things aren’t stocked online or there’s no consequence, that very easily spills into our everyday lives, and I think that’s a really big part of the equation right now.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How does that happen that this kind of incitement ends up on major social media platforms, I guess, you know, you mentioned four chan and you know, there have been for, for many, many years, all sorts of small right wing, alt-right sites that have some pretty horrible stuff on them. In recent months, we’ve been seeing it slowly creep towards more and more mainstream language on very public platforms. And I’m trying to figure out why that’s happening and, and where the line is or needs to be.

Dr. Shana MacDonald Well, I think that it, amazingly, it’s actually always been on the major platforms like Twitter, YouTube, et cetera, and they don’t have very strong regulation and they do not protect those who are most marginalized. What the difference is, say Twitter pre Elon Musk, is that there was enough of a community of support for those who experienced violence that it could be what we call ratioed. So if someone is experiencing violence, there can be a way in which it gets kind of pushed back quite strongly by a supportive community that doesn’t exist post Elon Twitter is a very different space. And it’s a space that in some ways I think is designed to allow for a much more prevalent voice of hatred to proliferate. I think YouTube has always been particularly good at promoting and platforming different influencers and personalities that spread hates. And I think one thing that we have to understand is that things kind of catch fire. So a good example is with misinformation. So there are people that are purposefully spreading particular kinds of misinformation or hate online in their platforms. The more widely those platforms get seen by others, the more that that message, even if it’s not kept in its original form, even if it gets diluted, gets spread into the larger public conversation. And even in its dilution, it can do harm. Because it begins to push at the senses of values that we share. So, as communities and as publics. And so it’s a really slippery slope. And this is where I think it gets really tricky because if we have all of this stuff kind of being unregulated, then we, we have the potential for this to shape conversations, especially with younger groups of people. And so, you know, Andrew Tate is wildly popular with young boys globally between the ages of 11 and 19. That’s a significant group that are forming a sense of masculinity at a moment when they have, you know, a model that is, is actually advocating for violence against women quite explicitly. And does it as a way of sort of showing the, the strength of his masculinity. So that’s how it happens and it gets diluted, but when it gets diluted, it becomes part of our everyday actions. And so you’re seeing then a larger, almost like acceptance or condoning of othering and, and thinking that there are hierarchies and that is okay to treat some groups, i.e. women with disdain or you know, outright disgust.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So far we’ve been talking about anti feminism and misogyny, which obviously has long played a role in academia, and we’ll talk about that in just a minute. But one of the reasons I’m glad to be talking to someone in the communications field is because the thing I keep coming back to in the language that the police used, you know, this was, hate crime based on gender expression and identity according to what they said. And what really interests me is the way that over time, and as this rhetoric escalates something, a word as simple as gender can come to signify like a lot of anti-trans sentiment that we’ve seen recently. Basically anything to do with the LGBTQ+ community and really like gender identity itself becomes almost a code word for whatever the other side wants to believe is horrible. How does it become that a word so neutral as gender comes to be a watch word for hate groups who would wish harm on a demographic?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Yeah. I think that in particular with the ways in which we are seeing really important gains on some level culturally, with an acceptance of trans communities in particular, we’re seeing again that really horrific backlash. Which you know includes stochastic terrorism, includes an absolute demonization of a population in particularly LGBTQ+ population because it starts to throw it. This is the classic playbook of conservatism. Put the children’s centre. Make it about children. Demonize, whatever’s threatening this so-called, you know, safety of children, right. And then all of a sudden you can implement a lot of terror and fear in a more broader population. You can begin to like pull on things like morals and ethics and preserve the family. All of these kind of really this, this is the playbook. And so like when we see in particular this targeting of transgender nonconforming, non-binary, communities through this threat of grooming. You know, that’s where this starts to fall apart. That’s misinformation. That’s absolute misinformation, and that’s the kinda misinformation that starts to threaten. I would say a broader, possibly more tolerant population, and it sways things to a different direction. So it’s, it’s really kind of grim because we’re seeing the ways in which that is inciting absolute violence against the trans community, but also that that spills out into these broader questions. But if you trace it back, you know, this has to do with what we talk about in, in more research context, like a fear of femininity, right? So it’s an assertion of a certain type of dominant masculinity, and we know, we see this assertion all the time with the kind of influencers who are in that men’s rights group. And I won’t name any more names, but I think we all know who I’m talking about, but that there’s an assertion of like, there is a, there is a moral and natural order to things, and that has a particular hierarchy, which includes a masculine dominance. So anything that threatens masculine dominance, anything that produces either a femininity or a feminine or a woman of any kind that is not passive is abnormal. Anything that doesn’t fit within a cis heteronormative paradigm is abnormal. This is kind of a, a way of thinking and it’s trying to preserve a very particular order that, I mean, has benefits for some right, and allows some, some to stay in power and then keeps the rest of us disenfranchised.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, in your piece, you make a direct comparison to your own youth in academics and via Ecole polytechnique massacre. And I mean, I think that gets to everything that you just described. What has and what hasn’t changed decades later?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Yeah, it’s kind of, it’s a really hard question and it makes me sad to even have to answer it because on one level I wanna say to you, well, lots has changed. You know, I’m an associate professor in a university who gets to teach and study these things, and there is support and the possibility of that. And there are students who want to learn. And I’m in a rich community that has great conversations. So that’s, you know, really important. But when something like this happens, especially at my own university, it just was this really grim reminder for me. So, that on some level I’m doing this against particular odds and in the face of people, groups and communities that don’t want me to be doing this. That somehow this is seen as a threat to something and that wants to keep me and others silent, and that’s a really hard thing to process and come to terms with. I don’t want to have to feel like by continuing to speak and continuing to teach the classes I do, that all of us have to somehow be more careful. I think what we need is like absolute resounding support that no, these are valid conversations to be having and all people have rights and that there shouldn’t be these kind of dominance hierarchies and that we have to speak against that. So yeah, I mean, I think that it was, it was when I saw the news and particular the confirmation that it was an attack based on the topic of the course that. You know, it just was like a gut punch because then you have to reevaluate and how do I keep myself safe? How do I keep my students safe? And yet how do we keep learning and, and having the conversation. So it, you can’t be an academic in Canada especially, who studies and teaches feminism from a certain age who isn’t marked by Ecole Polytechnique. You know, it’s built into us as this devastating reminder that there is power dynamics at play that sometimes we can’t keep ourselves safe from.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What can we do about that? And I’m not asking here about the police who, as you mentioned, at least first responders were on the scene quite quickly. Obviously the university has said publicly that they’ll be looking at ways to increase their security. But what can we do for the culture around campuses and academics in general where, you know, it is moving in a direction where anything related to gender or feminism or trans issues seems to come with a risk of pushback.

Dr. Shana MacDonald Well, I think that for those of us who can, and especially if we have sorts of privileges and protections that keep us somewhat safe, we need to sort of keep naming and when we see the sort of trickle down effect of these more egregious forms of hatred coming up in everyday public conversations, in the news, et cetera. We have to just take a pause and say, well, hold on a minute. What’s going on here? And who’s being harmed by this statement or this conversation? And you know, as a communications scholar, this is Communications 101, who gets to speak? Whose, whose voice gets to be heard and what harm and impact is that voice doing on others? And if it is, why are we letting it be there? And how do we find ways to proactively either produce a louder conversation that’s more supportive of those who are being harmed, amplifying, platforming, those who have a different insight against this hate. How do we make sure that happens? And how do we make sure that that kind of inflamed rhetoric that is absolutely going online into offline violence spaces gets stopped? How do we push back at every level and try and have a conversation? Where those who you know are not intimately connected with marginalized populations, but are seeing them be demonized, how do we make sure that they have the appropriate information and access to the kinds of knowledge that we need to kind of go forward in more equitable ways?

Jordan Heath Rawlings What about on campus itself? What will you be looking for in the next few days, weeks, months? What will you be doing differently, if anything?

Dr. Shana MacDonald Well, I’m not gonna stop teaching.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Good.

Dr. Shana MacDonald And I mean, I think that it certainly won’t silence any of us, I don’t believe. But we will probably have, increased levels of anxiety and caution that we feel on a very, like, lived everyday level. But I think that we have a responsibility to our students to make the spaces as welcoming and safe and productive for them as we possibly can. And to let them know it is okay to be in these spaces and ask these questions and learn these things. I think that one thing universities could do, especially if we’re acknowledging, or I’m suggesting we’re in a backlash that could last, you know, who knows as these things go, is to produce more solid support from central admin for this kind of research. Amplify it. Create networks, allow it to flourish and thrive and say, this is a part of university life, is to have these conversations. And that that kind of acknowledgement and institutionalization of these types of studies in a structural way will make it more present on campus, which will normalize it in a way that makes it, you know, harder to spread the disinformation that it is somehow threatening or evil or what have you.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Dr. MacDonald, thank you for this conversation and best of luck doing that on campus.

Dr. Shana MacDonald Thanks so much for having me.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Dr. Shana McDonald, the Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. That was The Big Story. For more, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. If you have feedback about this episode or any other. We always love to hear from listeners, especially with constructive feedback. These are difficult subjects to tackle and we try to do them and we wanna get them right, and for that we need your input. You can always find us on Twitter at least until somebody releases @TheBigStoryfpn to Blue Sky. Or you can email us hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca. And you can always call us on the phone. You can’t actually talk to us, but you can leave a voicemail. That number is 416-935-5935. The Big Story is available absolutely everywhere. You like to listen to podcasts, and if you like to listen to them on a smart speaker, just ask yours to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.