Ololade Faniyi
African Feminist Activist-Scholar & Doctoral Researcher
Digital activism and social movements
Technology and the African Imaginary
Platform studies and digital methods
African digital cultures
African Feminisms
Critical data studies
Ololade Faniyi is an interdisciplinary African feminist scholar and Ph.D. student in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Emory University. Interrogating the relationship between technology and African feminist thought, her graduate research explores digital African feminisms at the intersection of surveillance, quantification, platform governance and digital colonialism, alongside other intersectionalities. Her work 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. 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. 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.