Territorial Imagination: Embodiment, Symbolism, and Resisting State Violence
Based on my dissertation, this project examines the production of territorial imagination in the context of street demonstrations in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat). Thousands of Iranian Kurds took to the streets, first in October 2014 to express solidarity with Kobani in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) against the so-called Islamic State (IS), and then in September 2017 to support the independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan (Başur). Beyond consolidating cross-border solidarity with the Kurdish movements in Syria and Iraq, the Iranian Kurds’ demonstrations produced collective territorial imaginations of Kurdistan by using embodied, discursive, and symbolic tactics, enabling peaceful resistance against the Iranian state’s violence and militarization of space. Addressing the persistent Kurdish struggles to sustain the Kurdish homeland and existence in the face of ‘nation-state’ policies of denial, oppression, dispossession, and erasure, this research maintains that the demonstrations and their production of territorial imagination should be analyzed as part of the larger Kurdish liberation movement, rather than fleeting, isolated events.
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Producing territory, resisting the state: embodiment, discourse, and symbolism in street demonstrations in Iranian Kurdistan
Territorial Imagination: Social Media, Images, and Affect
Based on my dissertation, this project looks at the production of territorial imagination at the intersection of social media, visual images, and affect/emotion. It shows how the exponentially growing use of social media in Iranian Kurdistan between 2014 and 2017 was decisive in not only mobilizing Kurdish demonstrators in solidarity with the Kurdish movements in Syria and Iraq but also in creating effective and affective communities on social media that evoked territorial imaginations of Kurdistan. Combining digital methods and discourse analysis, this research shows how visual images, and their kinetic-emotive effects, are situated within broader geopolitical discourses that assign meaning to such images. In making this argument, the research indicates that affects/emotions are deeply intertwined with discourses, rather than being extra-discursive. Further, this research draws attention to the role of emotions in the Kurdish geopolitical struggles, not to suggest that Kurds are uniquely or exceptionally emotional, but to offer a deeper understanding of the embodied dynamics of the Kurdish resistance against state violence and dispossession.
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Territorial imagination: social media, visual images, and affect in Iranian Kurdistan
Precarity and Violence in the Kurdish Kolberi Economy
This collaborative project examines the lives and livelihoods of the kolbers, Iranian Kurdish laborers who carry loads on their backs across Iran’s border with Iraq and Turkey. Kolberi (as the labor is known) literally means: carrying loads on one’s back. Loads often weigh between 30 and 80 kg (66–176 lb), which kolbers carry for 5 to 15 km (3 to 9 mi) over a highly rugged terrain. Throughout their journeys, kolbers face multiple dangers, including direct shooting by Iranian (as well as Turkish and Iraqi) border guards, stepping on landmines, succumbing to cold and frostbite, drowning, and falling off the cliffs. Situating kolberi within the context of the Iranian state’s systematic geopolitical marginalization of the Kurdish region, this research sheds light on the state’s biopolitical strategies of economic de-development and pervasive securitization of Kurdistan that simultaneously push the Kurdish population toward kolberi while at the same time killing and maiming Kurdish bodies.
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Geographies of precarity and violence in the Kurdish kolberi underground economy
Palestine Solidarity Encampment on Campus: An Autoethnographic Account
I began participating in the pro-Palestine protests and encampment on the University of Oregon’s campus long before I had any intention or notion of writing about it. Yet over the weeks and months, as participation in the encampment and protests became central to my academic life, I started reflecting on the many questions, hopes, and frustrations that occurred to me—and many of those around me, including my students. In this piece, I have reflected on one specific day (May 20, 2014) of my participation in the encampment, and my efforts to mobilize solidarity with Palestine. Foundational to my embodied, affective, and intellectual engagements and my solidarity with the Palestinian people are my Kurdish experiences of dispossession, displacement, and resistance. As a Kurdish scholar and educator from a marginalized background, I recognize many parallels between the Palestinian and Kurdish liberation movements, despite contextual differences. Today, Palestine and Kurdistan are at the forefronts of the Indigenous peoples’ struggles for life, land, freedom, and dignity. In the face of the horrific tragedies unfolding in Gaza/Palestine, there is yet immense hope, resilience, and potential, manifested most clearly in the coalition of bodies coming together in alliance to uphold life, to care, to nurture. Building a truly internationalist coalition presents the only hope against the blazing flames of hate, death, and destruction, unleashed by the forces of the heteropatriarchal state, capital, war, and militarism.
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Fieldnotes from the Palestine Solidarity Encampment: Affect, Resisting Apathy, and What (Else) Can Be Learned from The Matrix
Academic Authoritarianism: A Geographic Perspective on Iran’s Cultural Revolution
This chapter looks at Iran’s Cultural Revolution (1980-1984) through a geographic approach, demonstrating that the Islamic Republic’s efforts to ‘culturally cleanse’ the campus spaces after the 1979 revolution have been foundational to the initiatives of its leaders, most notably Ayatollah Khomeini, to establish what they defined as a ‘truly Islamic society.’ In effect, the Islamic Republic’s policies led to the banning of all ‘un-Islamic’ organizations, publications, classes, and thoughts with hundreds of professors and students summarily expelled, imprisoned, and executed. Four decades on, as the Cultural Revolution has failed to accomplish its purported objectives, according to the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, the state efforts have continued to ‘Islamize’ the universities. The result has been the establishment of an extensive surveillance-security apparatus ruthlessly suppressing free thinking and association. Yet despite (and because of) the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian measures, university campuses continue to be the primary spaces of hope and progressive resistance.
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Academic Authoritarianism: Understanding Iran’s Cultural Revolution