Bahareh Badiei

BAHAREH BADIEI, then a graduate student at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, was approved funding in October 2024 to aid research on “Digital Dissents: Navigating Spaces of Imperial Feminism and Grassroots Resistance of Iranian Diasporan Activists on Social Media Platforms,” supervised by Dr. Deepa Kumar. The research examines Iranian diasporic digital feminist campaigns opposing compulsory hijab from 2015 to 2023, tracing three critical moments: My Stealthy Freedom on Facebook, #WhiteWednesdays and #GirlsOfRevolutionStreet on Twitter/X, and the mediation of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising on Instagram. Employing retrospective digital ethnography, descriptive network analysis, and in-depth interviews with anti-colonial feminist activists across the United States, Canada, and Germany, the project explores how platform architectures, affective economies, and geopolitical conditions shape which feminist demands become legible in transnational circuits and which are appropriated, silenced, or captured by imperial feminist logics. The project further illuminates how the lived experience of anti-colonial feminist collective organizing generates counter-hegemonic practices and unheroic modes of feminism that sustain, endure, and exceed the logics of datafied visibility.