Ololade Faniyi

• African Feminisms
• Feminist Technology Studies
• Technology and the African Imaginary
• Critical Data Studies
• Digital Ethnography
• Platform Governance
• Digital Activism and Social Movements
• African Digital Cultures

Ololade Faniyi is an interdisciplinary African feminist scholar and Ph.D. student in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Emory University. Her work adopts a multi-scalar approach to unpacking how African feminism can reframe our understanding of modern digital technologies with a decolonial lens grounded in African feminist principles of humanism and radical care. Her research has explored digital African feminisms and embodied archives at the intersection of state impunity, surveillance, quantification and platform governance, alongside other intersectionalities, adopting feminist intersectional “small data”, digital ethnographic, humanistic, and community-driven methodologies.

Ololade earned her BA in English and MA in African Studies from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and MA in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University (BGSU), where she received the Graduate College’s Best Thesis Award for her work on the digital cultures, hashtags and networks of feminist and queer justice in #EndSARS. She is presently an Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow. She is also an African regional advisor for FRIDA, the young feminist fund, and a graduate researcher for the Atlanta Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AIAI) Network. She was a Freedom on the Move Data Fellow at Cornell University in Summer 2023. In 2024, she joined The Republic Nigeria as their Gender and Feminisms sub-editor, to lead a new commissioning direction on “African Feminisms in Context”.

Her sole and collaborative works have been published in Communication, Culture and Critique, Feminist Africa, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Digital Social Research and peer-reviewed book chapters, including the edited anthology Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies. Beyond the academy, Ololade has written for public scholarship, made media comments, and been interviewed across radio, organizations, and scholarship in Nigeria and outside, where she shares insights on Nigerian gender trouble, feminist activism, African decolonial futures, and digital cultures. She has been featured in BBC (Focus on Africa), The Republic, OkayAfrica, Pulse Nigeria and New Lines Magazine.