The scope of my current research emerges at the intersections of Algorithmic Culture, Critical Coding Studies, Postcolonial Sociology, and Anti-colonial Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies. Broadly, my work examines the power relations, inequalities, and subjectivities produced in cyberspace, as well as the novel forms of agency that emerge within these digital environments.
My research introduces several conceptual tools to understand these dynamics: cybercolonialism, artificial intelligentsia, and cybaltern.
- Cybercolonialism captures the spatial dimensions of digital power—how infrastructures, platforms, and algorithmic architectures reproduce colonial logics of extraction, control, and domination across virtual and material terrains. I develop this concept further in Cybercolonialism and Citizenship (2022), analyzing how digital infrastructures regulate belonging, rights, and exclusion.
- Cybaltern—a portmanteau of cyborg and subaltern—defines a cursor subjectivity: a subjectivity that navigates and is shaped by algorithmic systems, existing at the margins of digital infrastructures while producing resistant modes of being and knowing. I first introduced this concept in Decoding the Cybaltern (2021), tracing how these emergent subjectivities reveal both vulnerabilities and possibilities for digital resistance.
- Artificial intelligentsia shifts the focus from artificial intelligence as a technical object to its embeddedness within intellectual, cultural, and epistemic hierarchies. By this term, I refer to the socio-technical class of algorithmic systems and their human curators, which function as a new kind of intelligentsia—shaping knowledge production, circulation, and access in ways that replicate elite gatekeeping. This concept frames AI as not merely computational infrastructure but as an emergent cultural authority defining legitimacy, expertise, and even forms of citizenship in cyberspace.
Together, these concepts allow me to analyze how agency and access are structured in digital environments and how marginalized communities both contest and are constrained by these dynamics. In the long term, my research seeks to bring these theoretical, conceptual, and methodological perspectives into an intersectional digital feminist framework, emphasizing questions of agency, access, and digital justice, while developing an anti-colonial feminist lens for understanding power and resistance in the algorithmic age. (see: Cybaltern: Feminismus, Intersektionalität und die Frage des digitalen Zugangs).