Ololade Faniyi

• African Feminism
• Critical Technology Studies
• Feminist Digital Cultures

Ololade Faniyi is an African feminist writer-practitioner, editor and Ph.D. candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her research is situated at the intersection of African feminism and critical technology studies, with a focus on alchemy-wise African women who reimagine techno-modernity’s completed forms across artificial intelligence, data work, platforms, and policy in service of the postcolony and decentered communities. Her work also explores Nigerian feminist digital cultures within political movements like #EndSARS and amidst encounters with the state, defensive publics, and algorithmic platforms.

Ololade is a 2026 recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, for her collaborative ethnographic study with/on women former data workers, community tech builders, and tech policy activists and lawyers across Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and South Africa.

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 a graduate fellow for the Atlanta Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AIAI) Network. Since 2024, she joined the Nigerian digital publishing platform, The Republic, as their Gender and Feminisms commissioning and thematic editor.

Ololade has previously served as an Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Co-Director, in addition to being a former PAGE fellow. From 2020 to 2024, she also served as an African regional advisor for FRIDA, the young feminist fund.

She has contributed as consultant, co-advisor and community of practice member to civil society organizations and knowledge collectives including TechHer Nigeria and Liberation Alliance Africa’s Sawaba Institute for Critical Consciousness Raising.

Her sole and collaborative works have been published in Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture and Critique, Feminist Africa, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Digital Social Research, and Women’s Studies in Communication.

Her latest forum article, “A Killjoy Witness: African Content Moderators and AI’s Relationalities of Extraction,” pushes against the “exceptional other” narratives surrounding African AI workers within a global logic of Big Tech’s racial capitalist profiteering, and adopts Ama Ata Aidoo’s killjoy ethos to refuse the comfort of technologies built on harm and the invisibilization of Africans. 

Ololade has written for public scholarship and has been interviewed across radio, digital publishing platforms, 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.