Sulafa Zidani is a writer, speaker, and educator at Northwestern University, where she is an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies. As a Critical Internet Studies scholar, she researches global civic engagement and online creative practices across languages. Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern, Dr. Zidani was an Assistant Professor of Global Civic Media in the Department of Comparative Media Studies|Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Her work has been informed by her proficiency in Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. Dr. Zidani is currently working on her first book project called All Your Meme Are Belong To Us: Internet Cultures in the Global South about how meme creators navigate transnational politics on the multilingual internet.
Writing for both academic and popular audiences is a key component of Dr. Zidani’s scholarly work. Her research has appeared in venues such as: Social Media + Society; International Journal of Communication; Asian Communication Research. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Resistance Online. Her public writing on popular culture and politics has appeared in Arabic and Anglophone publications.
Through her work, Dr. Zidani seeks to uncover what we can learn by centering the so-called Global South in Internet studies, and how the online creativity of young people can point us towards a more just and equitable Internet.
