Transnational Feminism in a Time of Digital Islamophobia

Authors: Zeinab Farokhi, Yasmin Jiwani, Faiza Hirji, Kenza Oumlil, Tanner Mirrlees

This panel brings together the contributors of a special issue of the Journal of Islamophobia Studies that addresses the operation and circulation of Islamophobic discourses on a transnational level through the realm of digital media.

Zeinab Farokhi

Zeinab Farokhi is a doctoral candidate at the Women and Gender Studies Institute and Diaspora and Transnational studies, University of Toronto. She received her M.A in Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto, and an M.A in Sociology from Osmania University, India, and B.A in History from Isfahan University, Iran. Her research interests include cyber feminism, transnational feminisms and diasporic studies. Her current doctoral work compares the usage of Twitter by Islamophobic right-wing extremists in India, Canada, and the US, focusing on anti-Muslim rhetoric in Hindu nationalist/white nationalist discourse.

Yasmin Jiwani

Yasmin Jiwani is a full professor and University Research Chair in Intersectionality, Violence and Resistance at Concordia University. She is also the author of Discourses of Denial, a critical examination of racist sexism and its circulation through popular media.

Faiza Hirji

Faiza Hirji is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia. Faiza specializes in research exploring media representation of race, religion, ethnicity and gender, use of media in the construction of identity, popular culture and youth, and the importance of media within diasporic/transnational communities. She is currently working on a project analyzing media depictions of Muslim women, as well as two special journal issues, one on Bollywood, Power and Politics, and the other on Racism and Colonialism in Canadian Communication Studies.

Kenza Oumlil

Kenza Oumlil is an Associate Professor in Communication at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI), Morocco. Oumlil holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. She has published widely on representation, gender, and media including articles in the Journal of North African Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Middle East Media, and Al-Jazeera English. She is currently working on a manuscript titled North American Muslim Women Artists Talk Back: Assertions of Unintelligibility.

Tanner Mirrlees

Tanner Mirrlees is an Associate Professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University and a steering committee member of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism (CHBE). Mirrlees’s current research focuses on US Empire and the cultural industries, war in the digital age, and far-right hate groups and social media. Mirrlees is the author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Cultural Industry (UBC Press, 2016), Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (Routledge, 2013), co-author of EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2019), and co-editor of Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Media, Technology, and the Culture of Militarism: Watching, Playing and Resisting the War Society (Democratic Communique, 2014), and The Television Reader (Oxford University Press, 2012).