Farokhi, Zeinab

Dr. Zeinab Farokhi earned her PhD in Women and Gender Studies and Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University (2022-24) and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her dissertation, “Digital Islamophobia: A Comparison of Right-Wing Extremist Groups in Canada, the United States, and India,” via qualitative discourse analysis investigated and tracked the gendered, affective, and transnational digital strategies, rhetorics, and affinities of anti-Muslim extremist actors on Twitter. Building on her dissertation, Dr. Farokhi’s postdoctoral research will conduct a mix-methods comparison of Hindu nationalist and white supremacist accounts on YouTube in order to further assess the affective and affinitive alignments among extremist groups and their exploitation of audio-visual affordances. Dr. Farokhi’s work emphasizes feminist approaches to extremism, digital media, and transnational and diaspora studies and highlights the urgent need to better understand how national and transnational extremist rhetoric manifests, spreads, and persuades across digital ecologies.