Ololade Faniyi

African Feminist Thought; Digital Cultures; Hashtag Activism; Platform Governance; Digital Humanities

Ololade Faniyi is an African feminist activist-scholar and Ph.D. student in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Emory University. Her graduate research reimagines African feminist thought in the digital age. She specifically focuses on digital cultures of Nigerian Twitter and pan-African feminist coalitions at the intersection of state surveillance, reactionary/defensive politics, platform governance, and AI-driven super-platformization. She adopts a feminist intersectional ‘small data’ and digital ethnographic approach to the study of hashtag activism and political communication.

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. 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. In Summer 2023, she was a Freedom on the Move Data Fellow at Cornell University.

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 relations, feminist activism, African decolonial futures, and digital cultures. She has been featured in BBC (Focus on Africa), The Republic, OkayAfrica, Pulse Nigeria, NPR (Goats & Soda), and Culture Review.