Biography
Sama Khosravi Ooryad is a PhD candidate at the department of Cultural Sciences at University of Gothenburg. Under supervision of Prof. Anna Backman Rogers and Prof. Mia Liinason, in her project she seeks to theorise internet memes and memefication of contemporary social justice movements, and to critically examine antifeminist, online hate cultures and their global manifestations beyond the oversimplified West/East or democratic/undemocratic divide. Sama also studies the anti-fascist, digital feminist networks and strategies that counter hate both offline and online.
Prior to her PhD, she graduated (cum laude) from a master’s programme in Women and Gender Studies at Utrecht University, for which she received full funding from the Erasmus Mundus GEMMA scholarship programme. For her master’s thesis, she 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. She also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from Urmia University and Shahid Beheshti University, respectively, in Iran.
Sama is a contributing editor for the peer-reviewed, open-access journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. She has taught, delivered seminars, and facilitated courses on Feminist Film Theory and Visual Culture, Feminism and Gender in Iran, and Critical Posthumanities at Gothenburg University and IranAcademia (an online university based in The Hague that advocates for freedom of speech and education).
Her 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, Feminist Media Studies (forthcoming) MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and CLCweb: Comparative Literature and Culture.