ESR Name: Sama Khosravi Ooryad
Institution: University of Gothenburg
Supervisor(s): L. Åkervall, M. Liinason
Project Title: Social Media Misogyny: Online Hate Against Women.
Project Synopsis: With the rise of far-right nationalisms in recent years, misogyny has intensified and rapidly extended beyond the internet into the streets to enact violence offline. The internet and digital platforms have acted as a pressure cooker for misogyny, which is a threat to women around the world. Since the “gamergate” scandal of 2014, academics have increasingly researched the topic (Ging and Siapera 2019). This project adopts a critical standpoint to explore the interconnected forces at play in understanding the spread of hate online and to critically analyze how misogyny and hate toward women on social media platforms have been reinforced as they spread across various platforms and media. In order to grasp the contemporary digital cultures’ relation to the spread of hate toward women (and other marginalized communities), the project examines the myths, stereotypes, and certain normative frameworks that these forms of misogyny follow online. Therefore, this project focuses on a critique of hate and misogyny in various contexts as well as a conceptualization of methods of countering hate online based on insights from film and media studies and gender studies. The project analyzes how these fields can clarify the entangled ways in which multiple figurations of misogyny convene in the technocultural sphere
ESR Biography: Sama Khosravi Ooryad is a PhD candidate at the department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. Her academic research has been generously supported by the European Commission. She holds a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies at Utrecht University and the University of Oviedo under the GEMMA Erasmus Mundus scholarship. Her master thesis at Utrecht University, which was graded Cum Laude, was a critical and conceptual analysis of online/offline protests of the (non-)movement of Girls of Enghelab Street, connecting their protest to the previous feminist protests in Iran. She also has a background in English and Comparative Literature (BA. and MA. degrees from Urmia and Shahid Beheshti Universities in Iran) and is a published poet writing poetry in Farsi, her mother tongue. She has done voluntary activism in organizations in Iran and the Netherlands and enjoys engaging in the collective processes of knowledge production and activism. She is a passionate gender, film and digital cultures researcher with a strong feminist, posthumanist and decolonial standpoint.