By Fatemeh Shams. In this article, the author reflects on seemingly disconnected events, such as “the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban” (2021), the rise of the “Women Life Freedom” Movement in Iran (2022) and the ongoing war in Gaza, under the lens of transnational feminist solidarity.
In Iran, urbanization has played a central role in establishing infrastructures of social control, labor exploitation, and resource extraction – all under the auspices of religious authority. The appropriation of natural resources and public goods has caused lasting damage to ecological systems, making the region one of the world’s most extreme cases of heat and pollution, as Nassim Mehran and Niloufar Vadiati argue in their contribution to the “Kin City” text series.
By Fatemeh Shams. If people in Iran are finding a voice, what words are they choosing to say? All revolutions have slogans – the collective fight reduced to a handful of memorable, chantable, printable words. But what are the origins of these slogans? And how have they changed over time?
In this piece, Nurçin Ileri interviewed Sanaz Sohrabi, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Montréal. Her doctoral project looks at how visual representations of oil have changed postcolonial sovereignty and resource nationalism in Iran over time. She is also an artist and filmmaker. In relation to her project, she prepares a trilogy of essay films
By Samad Alavi. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness anthologizes poems that testify to some of the last century’s darkest political tragedies. In her introduction, Forché establishes her basic criteria for selection. First, she includes only poems, as she wishes to demonstrate that the old “arguments about poetry and politics ha[ve] been too narrowly defined” and that it is possible to understand poems as residing between the personal and the political.
By Nassim Mehran. On 14 September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, was detained by Iranian police forces because of an “improper hijab.” Two days later, she was pronounced dead, allegedly due to police brutality. For Iranians living under the fundamentalist state’s oppression of women during the last 43 years, this is not an exceptional incident.
By Katja Rieck. In his most recent monograph, Exile and the Nation – The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (2020), Afshin Marashi provides a new perspective on Iranian nationalism.
By Olmo Gölz Pinpricks: On Small Moments with Seminal Impact “Nineteenth-century European revolutions often started in opera houses; the Iranian Revolution can be said to have begun in poetry-reading sessions.”[1]...
The new research project “Knowledge Unbound” is opening up innovative areas of research by focussing on key regions such as Africa, the Near and Middle East and the Pacific region.
By Alp Yenen “Turkey is not Iran” is the title of Metin Heper’s 1981 book review of C.H. Dodd’s Democracy and Development in Turkey (N. Humberside: Eothen Press, 1979). The...
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
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