Platformed feminism
How feminist activism becomes visible online, how backlash circulates, and how activists use humor, refusal, and counter-speech to stay present.
Research
Platforms, power, and feminist publics
I study how digital platforms, AI systems, and legal infrastructures decide who becomes visible, who gets punished, and how people push back. My work sits in feminist media studies, postcolonial critique, and qualitative research on Bangladesh and the Global South.
What I study
AI and representation
How generative AI imagines Global South activists, and how those images reproduce race, gender, class, and colonial hierarchies.
Law, religion, and control
How digital security law, religious sentiment, colonial legal inheritance, and state power shape what people can say online.
Current projects
AI-generated depictions of Bangladeshi feminist activists
This project examines how AI image generators represent Bangladeshi feminist activists. Prompting systems such as Meta AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok produced images shaped by familiar visual tropes: moralized femininity, protest stereotypes, and Western assumptions about South Asian political life.
The project asks what kinds of activists AI systems can imagine, which bodies and expressions become legible as feminist, and how training data quietly reproduces cultural hierarchy.
- Methods
- Visual content analysis, close reading, comparative prompting
- Focus
- AI representation, Global South feminism, cultural hierarchy
- Advisor
- Yangsook Kim
Social media as a battleground
This study analyzes anti-feminist backlash and feminist resistance in Bangladesh through 600 Facebook comments. It traces how activists are represented as morally corrupt, unattractive, unfeminine, or foreign, and how those labels are used to discipline feminist politics.
I also examine how activists and supporters respond through satire, exposing hypocrisy, calling out personal attacks, and challenging the association of feminism with Western contamination.
- Methods
- Qualitative content analysis, discourse analysis
- Sample
- 600 Facebook comments
- Status
- Presented at MSS 2025 and SSS 2025
Why does the state need a god?
This project studies religion, politics, and digital speech regulation in Bangladesh, focusing on how laws around religious sentiment are used to govern online expression. Rather than treating the Digital Security Act as only a contemporary problem, I read it through longer colonial legal continuities.
The project asks how legal categories become tools of social division, how secular and religious authority are mobilized together, and how colonial legal inheritances remain alive in digital governance.
- Methods
- Legal case study, historical reading, discourse analysis
- Sample
- 25 legal cases
- Focus
- Religious sentiment, colonial law, online speech
Papers and presentations
Social Media as a Battleground: A Qualitative Analysis of the Representation and Resistance of Feminist Activism in Bangladesh
Midwest Sociological Society 2025, poster and oral presentation; Southern Sociological Society 2025, oral presentation.
Eco-Friendly Housing Trends on Social Media: Identifying Consumer Demographics
Presented at the 40th International Narrative Conference, Miami, 2025.
Earlier threads
Emotional Labor in Legal Practice: Navigating the Complexities
Prof. Lotus Seeley · Spring 2024
Do predictive policing algorithms pose a risk to individual constitutional rights?
Prof. Matty Lichtenstein · Spring 2024
The Crucial Role of Grassroots Organizations and NGOs in the RMG Labour Movement in Bangladesh
Prof. Patricia Widener · Fall 2023
Does gender identity influence the perception of unisex fashion among young adults in Bangladesh?
Prof. J. Lotus Seeley · Fall 2023
'Life' before and after enforcement of Cyber Security Laws and Policies
Dr. Seuti Sabur · Fall 2021
How uncomfortable a prison for women inmates in Bangladesh
Dr. Saira Rahman Khan · Summer 2021
Why might non-elite women be disinterested in participating in movements?
Shehzad M Arifeen · Summer 2021
Gender representation in deodorant advertisements
Shahzad M Arifeen · Summer 2021
The Triple A (Availability, Accessibility, and Adaptability)
Independent research · Spring 2021
Challenges of application of Cyber Security Laws and policies regarding Human Rights Laws
Advocate Mostafa Hossain · Fall 2020
A Comparative Analysis on the Engagement of urban Middle-Class People in Social Movements: Political Hegemony
Shahzad M Arifeen · Summer 2020
Public writing
"Whose language is rumour?" Muktiforum, 2024