Mardiya is a feminist researcher, sociologist and community movement builder. Her work focuses on centering community-led techniques, and imaginations to frame technology designs and ownership. She makes the connection between space, communities and technological experience. Within their current journey, they are building the Flowers and Gardening Studio (F&G studio), which is their creative experimentation of a feminist outlet for play and creative imagination!
Mardiya started her journey as a researcher, investigating the effects of surveillance on minoritized communities, and methods they use to resist it. They went on to lead the global community of digital rights practitioners at Team Community, based at Article 19. At Team Community, Mardiya developed, and implemented strategies to weave and advance the sustainable movement building in digital rights communities within Africa, Asia, LATAM and MENA.
She was a Violence, Inequality and Peace fellow at University of San Diego’s Kroc Institute of Peace and Justice where she developed a research-based fiction work documenting the realities of existing in surveillance societies. Mardiya continues to lead various research projects, including ones researching how to invite market women into technology policy design as a grantee partner of the Mozilla Data Governance in Africa Research Fund. She has collaborated with other power houses such as Association for Progressive Communication (APC), and Chatham house as a mix-methods researcher.Â
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Mardiya draws from their extensive work in movement building, research and artistry to shape the modalities used in Flowers and Gardening Studio. She came into this as her way to sustainably and steadily contribute to digital rights work. Mardiya believes that creative data methods can be expressed through play, while inviting us to reimagine what it may require to create spaces that are layered in our shared communal relationships and cosmologies.Â
Mardiya is a sociologist, researcher, creative technologist and community movement builder. They work on making connections between community infrastructure, spatiality and technology. Within their current journey, they are building the Flowers and Gardening Studio (F&G studio), which is their creative experimentation of a feminist outlet for play and creative imagination!
Mardiya started her journey as a researcher, investigating the effects of surveillance on minority communities. They went on to lead the global community of digital rights practitioners at Team Community, based at Article 19. At Team Community, Mardiya developed, and implemented strategies to weave and advance the sustainable movement building in digital rights communities within Africa, Asia, LATAM and MENA.
She was a Violence, Inequality and Peace fellow at University of San Diego’s Kroc Institute of Peace and Justice where she developed a research-based fiction work documenting the realities of existing in surveillance societies. Mardiya continues to lead various research projects, including ones investigating methods of grounding data governance and innovation policy in Africa, as a grant awardee of Mozilla’s joint initiative with GIZ and the African Union. Mardiya also developed a critique of quantitative data collection methodologies and framings of Tech-facilitated gender-based violence data, in collaboration with APC’s Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN), focusing on the limitation within the race and ethnicity methods of collection, framing and analysis.
Currently Mardiya is building flowers and gardening studios, drawing from their extensive movement building and research in technology studies. She believes that play is important to honing our imaginations towards designing alternative spaces that are layered in our communal experiences and cosmologies.
Mardiya has publications on similar issues published with Bloomsbury press, Feminist Africa, Chatham House, and the Palgrave Handbook on Artificial Intelligence to name a few.