Ololade Faniyi

• African Feminism
• Critical Technology Studies
• Feminist Digital Cultures

Ololade Faniyi is an African feminist writer, practitioner, editor and Ph.D. student in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her research explores the relationship between African feminism and critical technology studies, with a focus on African feminist reimaginations of techno-modernity’s completed forms around AI and data work, platforms, and policy. Her work also interrogates Nigerian feminist digital cultures amidst encounters of the state, defensive publics and algorithmic platforms.

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.

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

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 (now Arts and Culture) commissioning and subject 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 and co-advisor to civil society organizations and knowledge collectives including TechHer Nigeria and Liberation Alliance Africa.

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.