Ouejdane Sabbah

Ouejdane Sabbah

Researcher

Ouejdane Sabbah is a research-oriented Creative Business lecturer with a Research Masters in Media Studies. Her focus lies at the intersection of creative digital infrastructures, cultural production platformisation, and the inclusion of marginalised groups, particularly North African women in the creative digital economy. 

Biography

Ouejdane Sabbah has academic and applied research experience in the fields of women's rights, social justice, and digital infrastructure of knowledge and cultural production. Through a sociological, political, and media perspective, she explores the ways in which these fields intersect.

Ouejdane holds a Research Masters' degree in New Media and Digital Culture and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Her research project, titled "Cultural Platform Labor at the Global Margins," focuses on the inclusion of North African women from working-class backgrounds in the creative platform economy. To investigate the algorithmic and social mechanisms that exclude Arab and Amazigh women from the digital creator economies, she employs digital ethnography, in-depth interviews, and participant observation. Her research aims to highlight the practices of financial and social empowerment of women at the global margins.

Moreover, Ouejdane is interested in data justice, and her blog publication titled "Sector Transgressions in East Africa: Synthesizing Insights from the Region" synthesizes findings about sector transgressions in East Africa that were exacerbated by COVID-19. This work was conducted through her role as an associate with the Global Data Justice European Project (TILT) and Data4Change.

Within the Creative Business program at the Hogeschool Utrecht, Ouejdane teaches courses such as Research Design, Effective Communications and Media and Culture, and supervises graduation assignments, which teaches the student the skills of effective research. 

Fields of expertise

  • Media and Culture 
  • Research Design 
  • Effective Communication
  • Project Proposal (Lecture)
  • Project Proposal (Supervision)

Research themes

Ouejdane’s research focuses of patterns of inclusion and exclusion in digital infrastructures.

 
Project title  Cultural Platform labour at the Global Margins
Keywords Content Creators, YouTube , North African women, Precarity, Algorithmic advertising, Self-branding, influencers
Year(s) of completion 2022-Present
General project description This PhD project examines the practices of Egyptian and Moroccan women content creators from a working-class background, as they navigate the digital platform YouTube. By combining interview data, on-the-ground observations, digital ethnographic fieldwork and news coverage in tandem with scholarship in media studies, gender studies, decolonial/postcolonial theory and feminism I will examine how both algorithmic and socio-economic precarity shapes different practices of authenticity, changes affective relations to their networked public, offer alternative visions of entrepreneurialism outside the Western paradigm. The aim of this project is to develop a feminist decolonial framework of understanding digital content creation analysis that centers the material conditions of working-class women in a majoritarian Arab, Muslim and Amazigh regions. 
Role in project Primary researcher

Other recent projects


Qualifications

  • Research Master’s in Media Studies Universiteit van Amsterdam 2018-2020