Talia Fiester

Talia Fiester’s research examines the affective and political dimensions of gendered experience in digital culture. Working at the intersection of feminist theory and affect theory, she is interested in how platforms mediate feminist politics, sexual violence survivorship, and the public negotiation of gendered harm. Her work attends to platform logics, racial and gendered capitalism, and structural conditions while operating at the level of discourse and affect.    

Talia approaches her projects as cultural studies questions with digital and affective inflections. Her current work develops the concept of the “paradox of collective resonance,” which examines how networked sexual violence disclosures offer survivors recognition while dispossessing them of the felt singularity of their own experience. Elsewhere, she theorizes the low-income stay-at-home mother on TikTok as a racially bifurcated figure whose domestic labor is extracted by the platform at the same time that it is denied state support. Across these projects, she remains rooted in feminist critique while drawing on affect theory, postcritical studies, and non-traditional epistemologies.     

Talia’s intellectual orientation is grounded in her background in sexual violence prevention and education, which informs her commitment to taking survivor experience seriously as a site of theoretical inquiry.     

Before coming to Annenberg, she earned a research master’s degree in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics, where her thesis on post-#MeToo discourse on TikTok laid the groundwork for the conceptual concerns of her current work.