Ololade Faniyi

• African Feminisms
• Critical Technology Studies
• Digital Cultures
• Platform Governance
• Digital Ethnography
• Digital Activism and Social Movements
• Media Studies and Political Communication

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 graduate work reimagines the relationship between African feminist decolonial thought and technology studies with an emphasis on the social, cultural, political and algorithmic dimensions of digital technologies. Her research also explores digital African feminisms and embodied archives, examining how Afro-feminist cultures and encounters emerge both within and beyond contexts of surveillance, repression, defensive movements, and platform governance. She adopts 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. Currently, she is an Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow, and a graduate researcher for the Atlanta Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AIAI) Network. 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”. She was a Freedom on the Move Data Fellow at Cornell University during the Summer of 2023. From 2020-2024, she served as an African regional advisor for FRIDA, the young feminist fund.

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.