Ololade Faniyi

Scholar-Practitioner of African Feminist
Technology Studies and Digital Cultures

About

I am an African feminist writer-practitioner and PhD candidate at Emory University. My dissertation research engages with a community of practice of African women reimagining data work, platforms, policy, artificial intelligence, and technological modernity in service of the postcolony and its decentered communities. Through this work, I am mapping an African Feminist Technology Study that draws on encounters of African feminist thought, decolonial technologies, and feminist human alchemy to reclaim how technology writes the human, knowledge hierarchies, codes of life, and scales of sufficiency.

Gender & Feminisms Sub-editor (thematic & commissioning editor), The Republic
Graduate Fellow, Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network, Emory University

Full Bio

Spotlight

Poster for Being an African Feminist Human in the Age of Technopower, featuring African women community technology creators. — As part of her dissertation fieldwork year, Ololade is a co-host, along with EthicsLab, University of Cape Town, of a convening that brings together African women community tech builders, former data workers, tech policy activists, and killjoy witnesses from Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and South Africa. Together, they co-create an African feminist mapping framework and charter on technology critique, reclamation, reimagination, and recreation. This convening is supported by the Wellcome-funded EthicsLab Research Development Programme and Ololade's Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.

Fellowship

2026 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow

For Ololade's collaborative multi-country ethnographic study with/on women former data workers, community tech builders, and tech policy activists and lawyers.

Kenya
Nigeria
South Africa
Zambia

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.

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Latest words

“What The Atlantic got wrong in its Caine Prize AI witch hunt”

Bearing Witness to the AI Literary Witch Hunt Disproportionately Targeting African Writers

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Press comments

BBC Focus on Africa

On rising femicide across Africa and gaps in data and justice, with Audrey Brown and Felix Kiprono.

New Lines Magazine

On Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti’s legacy and generational links in Nigerian feminist movements.

OkayAfrica

On the policing of queer and trans bodies in Nigeria

Pulse Nigeria

On Digital Catfishing and Toxic Empathy in Nigerian Male Skitmakers' Cosplay

Contact

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