surveillance
surveillance
Mardiya Siba Yahaya
Mardiya Siba Yahaya
Mardiya Siba Yahaya is a feminist digital sociologist, researcher and community movement builder whose work extensively investigates the implications of technology surveillance and datafied societies on minoritised genders and communities. Her research exists between technology, labour, surveillance, gendered publics and spatiality. Mardiya was also a Violence Inequality and Power fellow at the University of San Diego Kroc School of Peace and Justice, where she extensively explored shifting power dynamics in techno-societies centering effects of surveillance against gender minorities, while identifying their techniques of resistance in building counter-movements and publics.
Feminist talk
Making space for the unkind
This story weaves grief, ecological destruction, technological collapse, and political resistance into a narrative that questions the systems sustaining both digital infrastructures and extractive economies. Blending fiction, political commentary, and artistic imagination, the piece follows two characters grappling with loss, misinformation, and the erasure of working-class lives that sustain…
Feminist talk
Black Africans’ Right To Opacity and Society’s Violent Will to Know
Mardiya Siba Yahaya explores the right to opacity as a refusal of the violent demand to be visible, legible, or measurable within dominant systems. Through a personal encounter and reflections from queer African communities, she examines how surveillance - both social and technological - forces marginalised people to prove their worth, often at the cost of safety and autonomy.
Feminist talk
Resilience through Internet Research: Reflections on Conducting Research with Front-Line Defenders in the Horn of Africa
Academically, politically, socially, religiously, realistically and holistically, what is resilience? This reflective piece takes us through the behind the scenes and in-betweens of a research on the (in)visibilitiy of muslim women human right defenders in the Horn of Africa. In their reflection of the research, an invitation to reckon with seeing oneself in the “subject” of one’s research,…
Feminist talk
What can digital surveillance teach us about online gender-based violence?
The article argues that digital surveillance is part of gendered and racist disciplinary structures, that manifest in specific forms of online gender-based violence experienced by black Muslim women influencers.
