Indigenous Feminisms: Afghan and Iranian Women’s Lives Under the Theocratic State
Free 10-Week Online Seminar
Hosted on Zoom – Register for Link
Every Friday, March 8 – May 10, 2024
9:30 – 11:00 AM ET
Course Description
This 10-week online seminar will provide participants with a deeper understanding of indigenous feminism and the forms of oppression, marginalization, and misrecognition that they are designed to oppose. Focusing on Indigenous women as well as members of sexual minorities, participants will examine the resources offered by intersectional and de-colonial feminist approaches as they are formulated and practiced in Iran and Afghanistan.
Participants will also study various emerging indigenous social movements and explore ways of producing emancipatory knowledge in the service of decolonization and indigenous sovereignty. In each session, co-leaders will open a dialogue to identify, compare, and analyze the situation of Iranian and Afghan women under a patriarchal culture and the dominance of theocratic states. Finally, this seminar will investigate the capacity of civil society, public opinion, and social media to provoke and sustain social resistance in each context.
Seminar Leaders
Dr. Sahraa Karimi
Dr. Sahraa Karimi is a film director, scriptwriter, and university lecturer from Afghanistan. In 2016, Karimi became the first woman to serve as director general of the Afghan Film Association. She is the director of over 30 short films, three documentaries, and one feature film. Her current project, “Flight From Kabul”, was recently awarded the Works in Development Award from the 2023 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Dr. Naima Mohammadi
Dr. Naima Mohammadi is a visiting teaching assistant professor at the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. her research focuses on the experiences of Muslim women issues in non-Muslim majority contexts. She previously served as a visiting scholar at the Global Studies Center (GSC) at the University of Pittsburgh (2022) and the Department of Political Science, Law, and International Studies at the University of Padova, Italy (2020-2021).
More Information
Participants who attend at least 8 out of 10 complete seminar sessions will receive a certificate of satisfactory completion signed by the Dean of The New School for Social Research. In order to obtain the certificate, participants must register and log in with the same email address each week.