Bahareh Badiei

Bahareh 'Bahar' Badiei examines digitally mediated activism and resistance strategies through a decolonial feminist lens. Her dissertation, in particular, examines how transnational diasporic projects and campaigns may simultaneously reproduce imperialist practices while rupturing the violence of such agendas and opening spaces for genuine maneuvers of feminism. She seeks to produce public-facing knowledge that disturbs the simplified mediation of MENA region plural subjectivities. Informed by bell hooks, her teaching centers on education as a practice of collective freedom, where students co-create knowledge and develop critical thinking together. 

Badiei's work has been recognized with the Outstanding PhD Student Award from Department of Journalism & Media Studies, the Top Student Paper Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Media Conference, the Decolonizing the Representation of Muslim Women Fellowship from UC Davis, and the Graduate Research Grant from Rutgers’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her research appears in the International Journal of Communication and New Media & Society, with forthcoming work in Convergence and Communication Monographs. She has presented her research for the International Communication Association, National Communication Association, Middle Eastern Studies Association, Association of Internet Researchers, as well as the Association for Education of Journalism and Mass Communication. She has also served as a guest speaker at institutions including the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Currently, her dissertation is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. It contributes to innovative theoretical frameworks around dialectics of digital activism, datafied visibility, and the enactment of resistance despite systemic erasures.

M.A., Communication, Western Michigan University
M.A., Communication, Allameh Tabataba'I University
B.S., Social Communication Science, University of Tehran