This multimodal project explores how young Iranian women social media influencers in the 21st century circumvent authoritarian surveillance, forced migration, and digital censorship to continue practicing their feminist activism transnationally during the period from 2018 to 2025. This work features an interactive map that chronicles the stories of women such as Aida Pooryanasab (Toronto), Faravaz Farvardin (Berlin), and Ramina Torabi (Istanbul), who have been forced to migrate across borders to maintain their digital presence. Through digital narrative storytelling and geographical visualization, we demonstrate how digital activism crosses geographical borders while documenting the human cost of authoritarian governance on women’s bodies and autonomy. These influencers, mostly in their twenties and thirties, represent a generation that uses social media to challenge traditional feminist constraints through personal storytelling, visual creativity, and political activism, to create new modalities of resistance that demonstrate the tangible, embodied, emotional, demanding, and contextual nature of contemporary feminist digital practices. This digital element not only serves as a research instrument but also approaches contextualized circulation of this information and digital preservation, making these stories accessible in various forms in case of algorithmic shift or removal of contents on the original websites.
Author Biographies
Niloufar Esmaeili is a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research focuses on digital media activism, transnational feminism, and gender violence in Iran, with particular emphasis on how network visualization tools document resistance under authoritarian conditions. She has created a digital archive dedicated to the Women, Life, Freedom movement and developed network visualizations using GraphCommons to document Iranian women’s digital activism and transnational solidarity networks. Grounded in feminist methodologies that prioritize activist agency over institutional control, her work employs digital humanities tools to make visible patterns of state repression and feminist resistance that authoritarian regimes attempt to obscure. Her approach to network visualization as an act of resistance reflects commitment to counterdata science practices that challenge state information monopolies while maintaining ethical commitments to activist safety and community governance of data.
Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla is an Assistant Professor in Public and Digital Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio. A transfronteriza from the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border region, her research leverages theory of the flesh, interdisciplinary studies, and digital technologies to develop ethical and inclusive scholarly work. She has collaborated on Mellon and NEH grant-awarded projects, bringing extensive experience with network analysis, digital archiving, and community-engaged scholarship. Her bilingual scholarship has appeared in Hispania, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Debates in Digital Humanities. She was invited editor for the first bilingual special issue on “Borderlands Digital Humanities” in Reviews in Digital Humanities. Her work centers transnational, multilingual, and social justice-oriented approaches to digital humanities, with particular attention to how network visualization and digital technologies can serve movements for social change while respecting ethical boundaries around representation, access, and community control.