Sama Khosravi Ooryad
About Sama Khosravi Ooryad
I am a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the Department of Cultural Sciences. My project is part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral network NETHATE, which is a network of excellence for training to understand and counter hate online. Our network consists of more than fifteen academic institutions and civil society organisations that are based throughout the EU and UK.
My project critically examines antifeminist, online hate cultures and their global manifestations beyond the oversimplified West/East or democratic/undemocratic divide. I also study the anti-fascist, digital feminist networks and strategies that counter hate both offline and online.
Prior to my PhD, I graduated (cum laude) from a master’s programme in Women and Gender Studies at Utrecht University, for which I received full funding from the Erasmus Mundus GEMMA scholarship programme. For my master’s thesis, I focused on the cultural tools of constructing political kinship via social media activism as well as urban performative protests against compulsory hijab in Iran by the Girls of Enghelab Street. I also hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from Urmia University and Shahid Beheshti University, respectively, in Iran.
I am a contributing editor for the peer-reviewed, open-access journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. I have taught, delivered seminars, and facilitated courses on Feminist Film Theory and Visual Culture, Feminism and Gender in Iran, and Critical Posthumanities at GU and IranAcademia, an online university based in The Hague that advocates for freedom of speech and education.
My scholarly work on internet memes, global mediations of hate, digital justice activism of Iranian Dadkhah mothers, theorising (elderly) women’s activism in Iran and the diaspora, transnational feminism and epistemic justice, exilic Persian poetry and comparative study of Iranian and US language poetry movements, has been published in the form of book chapters as well as double-blind, peer-reviewed journal articles in Feminist Theory, Media, Culture and Society (forthcoming), MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and CLCweb: Comparative Literature and Culture.