ASTRSC was started in the summer of 2017 at Stanford University’s Center for African Studies by Toussaint Nothias and Zineb Oulmakki. The project, now hosted and developed in the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, is supported by an advisory board of writers, scholars, activists, and journalists tired of seeing the same old, dehumanizing stereotypes about Africa reproduced time and time again!
Team
Toussaint Nothias (Co-founder and project lead)
Toussaint Nothias is Associate Director of Research at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University. His research explores journalism, digital media and civil society across various African contexts. He holds a PhD in Media and Communication from the University of Leeds. He has conducted more than 70 in-depth interviews with foreign and local journalists in Africa, and has published widely in leading communication journals including The Journal of Communication; Media, Culture, and Society; Journalism Studies; the International Journal of Communication; Communication, Culture, Critique; Visual Communication; and African Journalism Studies.
Zineb Oulmakki (Co-founder and former research assistant)
Zineb Oulmakki (Stanford 17′, International Relations) is a communications intern at ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association). Prior to this, she was a program associate for the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders at IREX (the International Research and Exchange Board). Zineb is passionate about the continent’s development and the intersection of social justice, journalism and digital technology.
Tsion Tesfaye (former research assistant)
Tsion Tesfaye (Stanford’21) is pursuing a masters in Statistics: Data Science. As an East African native, she is invested in the representation of Africa in global media and strongly aligns with ASTRSC’s mission. Prior to Stanford, Tsion worked in the education, health care, and non-profit sectors.
Anabelle Colmenares (Research assistant)
Anabelle is a rising senior in Computer Science at Stanford University. During the summer of 2022, she worked as a tech intern at Algorithm Watch in Berlin, Germany. During this internship, she worked on AW’s new iteration of their DataSkop project (focusing on TikTok) and on other small projects. Specifically, she collaborated with designing and refining the data visualizations for DataSkop, and she implemented some of the visualizations. She is particularly interested in any work centered around queerness, race/ethnicity, gender, the environment, climate change, animal welfare, and any work that intersects those categories. Currently, she is working on refining the functionality of the ASTRSC tool. This primarily involves optimizing the code so it can effectively detect the most amount of relevant words and ignore the most amount of irrelevant words, testing the tool, and adding new features to the ASTRSC website.
Advisory Board
Seyram Avle (Assistant Professor of Global Digital Media, University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
Abdi Latif Dahir (East Africa Correspondent, The New York Times)
Sean Jacobs (Associate Professor of International Affairs, New School; founder and editor of Africa is a Country)
Nanjala Nyabola (Author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya)
Julie Owono (Executive Director, Internet Sans Frontières)
Herman Wasserman (Professor of Media Studies, University of Cape Town)