My research offers new insights on the role of visuality in protest, showing how digitally shared pictures and videos may not only complement but substitute key aspects of mobilization such as identity formation, strategy, and organized dissent. 

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In my dissertation, I took the example of Iranian women's digital-physical protests to show how social media pictures of women publicly unveiled, singing, dancing, and biking - acts all banned under the Islamic Republic - served as a cornerstone of resistance to gender-discriminatory laws. Women digitally shared pictures of physical acts in circumventing the barriers to mass mobilization in an otherwise authoritarian context, undermining state mechanisms of control meant to systematically suppress acts of gender defiance before they can even surface. Pictures visualized new expressions of gender, sex, and male-female relations that contested state gender norms. Over time, these ideas transferred and overtook the public sphere to normalize a new gender ideology, demonstrating the power of what I term an emerging class of "visual protest movements."

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In a peer-reviewed article building on key themes of this research which I published in Gender, Place & Culture, I demonstrated how social media images systematically und0 government controls over public space, attacking a pillar of state patriarchal power. Both projects contributed to recent debates on social movements, social media, and the politics of power and resistance in the Middle East, offering new insights on digital media as more than just an expressive medium. 

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My research has been supported by the American Association of University Women, American Political Science Association, the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon, and the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, among other organizations.

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Before academia, I worked in nonprofit for several years.