Measuring French Representation on Social Media

Wednesday, April 8, 2026 | 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM | Arrupe Multipurpose Room, Georgetown University Main Campus

Hosted by the Georgetown University Gender⁺ Justice Initiative and Massive Data Institute.

Join us to examine how misrepresentation spreads on social media, and how these patterns are evolving as platforms become more fractured.

About the speakers:

Rokhaya Diallo is a renowned journalist, author, filmmaker, and antiracist feminist advocate, who has fought tirelessly against racial and gender discrimination in France and beyond. She is the author of a dozen books and writes a monthly column in the Washington Post, covering issues of racism and sexism in France and abroad. She hosts a podcast with Grace Ly called Kiffe Ta Race (Binge Audio), a show which critically examines issues of identity and race. In 2022, she founded W.O.R.D a school whose mission is to teach communication and public speaking skills to emerging advocates and organizers. She is the Georgetown Gender⁺ Justice Initiative’s inaugural Researcher-in-Residence for 2021-2024. Follow on Twitter: @RokhayaDiallo and Instagram: @rokhayadiallo.

Lisa Singh is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She is also the Director of the Massive Data Institute. Singh has authored/co-authored over 100 peer reviewed publications and book chapters related to data-centric computing, i.e. data mining, data privacy, and data science, and is the co-author of Words That Matter: How News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Election. Current projects include developing methods and tools to better understand forced movement due to conflict, learning from public, open source big data to advance social science research involving the understanding of human behavior and opinion, identifying poor-quality information on social media, studying privacy on the web, and understanding social structures and behavior dissemination in animal societies.

Andrew Sobanet is Professor of French & Francophone Studies and Advisor to the Provost for University Qatar Collaborations. He has previously held several leadership roles in the College of Arts & Sciences, including interim dean, vice dean for faculty affairs, and chair of French & Francophone Studies. Prof. Sobanet studies the intersection of politics, literature, and culture. He is the author of Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Indiana University Press, 2018); he has also published widely on Vichy France. He is editor of Revisioning French Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2019) and several special journal issues. As a faculty affiliate of the Massive Data Institute, he contributed to a team analyzing political discourse in French-language social media.