Symposium: Resisting patriarchal worlds, traveling struggles, and feminist networks

TechnAct is a research cluster on gender, sexualities, emergent communities and technocultural assemblages. TechnAct consists of researchers and PhD students based at Lund University and Gothenburg University.

Event information 

The last months of 2022 have marked a unique uprising, now being called a “feminist revolution in the making,” in Iran and globally. This uprising was sparked in the aftermath of the state-murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, which ignited country-wide and global protests against the numerous intersectional inequalities in Iran.

The street and mediated protests and the global solidarity they have generated are inspiring to all those who are fighting any form of capitalist, racial patriarchy and its multifaceted mutations in today’s conjuncture. Global expressions of solidarity with women and marginalized bodies in Iran—from our sisters and allies in Chile, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as well as the many social justice communities in the US, UK, Australia, and all parts of Europe—are manifestations of struggles and fights that are situated yet shared.

This historic conjuncture and “feminist revolution in the making” in Iran are calls to action to create more potent transnational solidarity and fiercer feminist resistance to ever-mutating, continuously emerging patriarchal worlds. Moreover, it reveals more clearly than ever that our struggles travel while remaining specific to our grounded situations, just as our fights
cross borders and imposed imaginaries with different tools.

How, then, can we acknowledge the resistances of women in Iran without falling into a universalist, (neo-)orientalist reduction of their specific situated struggles? How might transnational solidarity with women and marginalized bodies in Iran look in light of the uprising for Jina? And what is the importance of feminist networks within this inquiry and historic moment?

In this one-day symposium, we will gather to critically reflect on this historic conjuncture and collectively think-with and act-with all bodies in continuous resistances.

Program 

Keynotes + Q&A (Chair: Sarah Bodelson)

10:15-10:55 - Professor Fataneh Farahani (Stockholm University) "Decolonial solidarities and the troubling diasporic epistemic responsibilities"

10:55-11-35 - Professor Mia Liinason (Lund University) "Radicality and revolt: Transnational struggles, spaces and emergent feminist agendas"

11:35-11:50 - Break

11:50-12:30 - Dr. Leila Papoli-Yazdi (Malmö University) "I am “Iran”: a revolution against the reconstructed images of Iranian women"

12:30-13:30 - Lunch break

Roundtable + Discussions

Moderator: Sama Khosravi Ooryad

13:30-13:50 - Parvin Ardalan

13:50-14:10 - Dr. Paula Mulinari

14:10-14:30 - Dr. Marta Kolankiewicz

14:30- 14:50 - Olga Sasunkevich

14:50-15:10 - Sama Khosravi Ooryad

15:10-15:30 - Discussions

15:30-16:00 - Wrap up and finish