Ali Mozaffari (heritageinwestasia.com) is Fellow of the Australian Research Council (ARC) and Senior Research Fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. He holds an M.Arch. from Tehran University’s Faculty of the Fine Arts and a PhD from the University of Western Australia. His research straddles the disciplines of anthropology, heritage, and architecture with a specific focus on Wet Asia. He is the founding co-editor of Berghahn’s series Explorations in Heritage Studies.
In addition to his academic work, Ali is an architect and urban designer with past practical experience gained through individual and collaborative work in Iran and Australia. His works have been recognised in competitions and professional publications.
This is the Persian translation of Development, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in La... more This is the Persian translation of Development, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in Late Twentieth-Century Iran: A Vital Past published in 2020 by Manchester University Press
جایگزین شدنِ نظم سیاسی جهانیِ متّکی بر امپراطوریها توسط نظمی متّکی بر دولتملتها طی روندی چهارص... more جایگزین شدنِ نظم سیاسی جهانیِ متّکی بر امپراطوریها توسط نظمی متّکی بر دولتملتها طی روندی چهارصدساله بهوقوع پیوست. آغازِ آن، با سرزدنِ جنبشهای اصلاحگری دینی در قرن شانزدهم میلادی همراه بود و پایانش، مستلزم دو جنگ جهانی. ایران، همچون یک موجودیت سرزمینیِ دیرپا و یک فرهنگِ کهن با یک سابقهٔ طولانی در همزیستیِ اقوام مختلف، هم در آغاز این بحران، سعی و تلاشی توأم با موفقیت به معنای تأسیس دولتی ایرانی انجام داد و هم در پایانِ راه در تثبیت و تحکیمِ آن دولت. اکنون بدان صورت که در این کتاب توضیح داده شده است، این تلاش و تکاپوها در دو دورهٔ نامبرده به تبیین دو انگاره از «وطن» انجامیدند که اغلب در هر دو سطح عام و رسمی یکدیگر را تقویت کردهاند. با اینهمه همانطور که در این کتاب از طریق ساخت و سپس بازسازیِ موزهٔ ملّی ایران توضیح داده میشود، در تاریخ معاصر ایران دوبار تلاشِ بیحاصلی انجام شد برای رسیدن به درکی یکپارچه از وطن که فقط بر پایهٔ یکی از این دو انگاره استوار باشد. نتیجه آنکه وطن همچون مفهومی ناپایدار و مبهم باقی ماند.
This is the translation to Persian of my book Forming National Identity in Iran (I.B. Tauris 2014).
This book analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural desig... more This book analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural design in the developmental context of Iran, a country that has endured radical cultural and political shifts in the past five decades. Offering a trans-disciplinary approach toward complex relationship between architecture, development, and heritage, Mozaffari and Westbrook suggest that transformations in developmental contexts like Iran must be seen in relation to global political and historical exchanges, as well as the specificities of localities.
The premise of the book is that development has been a globalizing project that originated in the West. Transposed into other contexts, this project instigates a renewed historical consciousness and imagination of the past. The authors explore the rise of this consciousness in architecture, examining the theoretical context to the debates, international exchanges made in architectural congresses in the 1970s, the use of housing as the vehicle for everyday heritage, and forms of symbolic public architecture that reflect monumental time.
HERITAGE MOVEMENTS IN ASIA Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity, 2020
Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. T... more Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place. By bringing social movements into heritage studies, the book advocates a shift of perspective in understanding heritage, one that is no longer bound by (at times arbitrary) divisions such as those assumed between the state and people or between experts and non-experts.
REVIEWS “This book significantly contributes to our understanding of the complexities of heritage in Asia. It broadens our horizons to look at issues of governance, state-society relations, and the institutional ways memory and material culture are politically negotiated. It reveals heritage as a series of movements, unpacking, elaborating and critiquing what that term means in different social settings. An exciting contribution to the examination of heritage in Asia.” • Tim Winter, University of Western Australia, Professor of Critical Heritage studies, Author of Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century
“The book is a wake-up call for heritage practitioners who still too easily think of the material past as a static and unmediated record of times past. Heritage Movements in Asia reminds us that the heritage expert is only one among numerous players competing to inscribe meaning on the traces of the past embedded in the ground we all live on. As this book vividly illustrates, heritage activism, whether in the form of mass mobilisation or more intimate engagements, is what gives the material past its dynamism.” • Denis Byrne, Author of Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia
“Looking at heritage processes through the lens of social movements, this volume adds a meaningful contribution to the growing literature of critical heritage studies.” • Neel Kamal Chapagain, Director of the Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University
Pasargadae is the location of the tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Thro... more Pasargadae is the location of the tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Through the ages it was Islamised and the tomb was ascribed to the Mother of Solomon. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that archaeological evidence demonstrated the relationship between the site and Cyrus and it was appropriated into conflicting political discourses on nationalism and Islamism while concurrently acknowledged as a national and then a World Heritages site. However, Pasargadae is neither an isolated World Heritage site, nor purely a symbol of abstract state politics. Pasargadae and its immediate vicinity constitute a living landscape occupied by villagers, nomads and tourists.
This edited volume presents for the first time a broad, multi-disciplinary examination of Pasargadae by experts from both outside and within Iran. It specifically focuses on those disciplines that are absent from existing studies, such as ethnography, tourism and museum studies providing valuable insights into this fascinating place. In conclusion, the book argues that to understand World Heritage sites and their problems fully, a holistic approach should be adopted, which considers the manifold of perspectives and issues and it puts forward a novel approach to the question of heritage, representation and construction of collective identity from the framework of place.
Modern Iran is a country with two significant but competing discourses of national identity, one ... more Modern Iran is a country with two significant but competing discourses of national identity, one stemming from ancient pre-Islamic customs and mythology, the other from Islamic Shiite practices and beliefs. This has left an often confused notion of identity in Iran. Ali Mozaffari explores the complex processes involved in the formation of Iranian national identity, laying particular stress upon the importance of place to ideas of homeland and the creation of a collective national identity. He illustrates his arguments through an analysis of the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persepolis and the Shiite rituals of Moharram. In a concluding part, he extends his analysis to the Ancient Iran Museum and the Islamic Period Museum, housed in the National Museum of Iran. An important work that offers powerful insights into the forces shaping national identity in Iran.
We first wrote and presented an early version of this work to the Peripheral Modernisms Internat... more We first wrote and presented an early version of this work to the Peripheral Modernisms International Conference held at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London in March 2012. Since that time, our position has developed, and we have used the research material and the insights gained, some of which are articulated here, in other works (see Mozaffari and Westbrook 2014, 2020, 2022). The question of peripherality, however, remains important in that it forces us to think in terms of global exchanges rather than, purely in terms of resistance and the parochialism and distortions that this may entail.
---
This collection of essays reappraises the contributions made by modernist movements from regions generally regarded as peripheral or semi-peripheral to a global aesthetic of Modernism. It particularly focuses on European semi-peripheries, combining theoretical chapters and individual case studies to examine the cultural and aesthetic complexities of so-called peripheral modernisms. Contributing to research on the ‘transnational turn’ in New Modernist Studies, the volume takes recent scholarship on postcolonial modernisms one step further by exploring a broader geopolitical expanse than the (formerly) colonised regions under global capitalism. It highlights the local and translocal specificities of modernist movements from regions such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean to offer new insights into the concept of global modernism.
The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction, 2023
In this chapter, we will present an overview of heritage destruction types and their causes in th... more In this chapter, we will present an overview of heritage destruction types and their causes in the Caucasus and elaborate on some specific examples. Heritage destruction has been committed by multiple groups in the Caucasus and under various circumstances, but generally following three themes: motivations, sources, and instruments or means. Most types of heritage destruction in the Caucasus are linked to issues of genocide and ethnocide. Importantly, heritage destruction in this context is changing, with outright destruction now being replaced with alteration of sites to deny the heritage claims of ethnic rivals. In this chapter, the authors will begin the discussion with brief information about the historical and geographical background of the region and the forms of heritage that are present. Within this region, we will dedicate additional attention to the case of the Armenia-Azerbaijan heritage conflicts on the grounds that this is the latest iteration of a major conflict that incorporates the three typologies.
Islamic Pasts and Heritage Presents, Edited by Trinidad Rico, Jun 2017
From the 1960s, Iran, like many other similar countries experienced a radical urban expansion and... more From the 1960s, Iran, like many other similar countries experienced a radical urban expansion and industrialization, chiefly as a result of the expanding oil industry. Internal migration fuelled by industrialization created both a crisis of habitation and a cultural dissonance, in response to which various schemes were developed for model communities, intended to bridge the gap between Iranian culture, its heritage and modern urbanism. We will examine one such ‘model community’, New Shushtar, a housing complex adjacent to the ancient heritage town of Shushtar, in which architectural motifs and images were used to evoke and perhaps invoke authentic traditional life. We will place this complex within the broader context in the Muslim world of attempts to defend regional culture from the effects of globalisation.
Citation:
Mozaffari, Ali, and Nigel Westbrook. 2017. “Reclaiming Heritage Through the Image of Traditional Habitat.” In The Making of Islamic Heritage: Muslim Pasts and Heritage Presents, edited by Trinidad Rico, 47–65. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
World Heritage in Iran: Perspectives on Pasargadae, Dec 2014
This chapter proposes and illustrates a conceptual approach to the World Heritage site of Pasarga... more This chapter proposes and illustrates a conceptual approach to the World Heritage site of Pasargadae through the idea of place
This is the Persian translation of Development, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in La... more This is the Persian translation of Development, Architecture, and the Formation of Heritage in Late Twentieth-Century Iran: A Vital Past published in 2020 by Manchester University Press
جایگزین شدنِ نظم سیاسی جهانیِ متّکی بر امپراطوریها توسط نظمی متّکی بر دولتملتها طی روندی چهارص... more جایگزین شدنِ نظم سیاسی جهانیِ متّکی بر امپراطوریها توسط نظمی متّکی بر دولتملتها طی روندی چهارصدساله بهوقوع پیوست. آغازِ آن، با سرزدنِ جنبشهای اصلاحگری دینی در قرن شانزدهم میلادی همراه بود و پایانش، مستلزم دو جنگ جهانی. ایران، همچون یک موجودیت سرزمینیِ دیرپا و یک فرهنگِ کهن با یک سابقهٔ طولانی در همزیستیِ اقوام مختلف، هم در آغاز این بحران، سعی و تلاشی توأم با موفقیت به معنای تأسیس دولتی ایرانی انجام داد و هم در پایانِ راه در تثبیت و تحکیمِ آن دولت. اکنون بدان صورت که در این کتاب توضیح داده شده است، این تلاش و تکاپوها در دو دورهٔ نامبرده به تبیین دو انگاره از «وطن» انجامیدند که اغلب در هر دو سطح عام و رسمی یکدیگر را تقویت کردهاند. با اینهمه همانطور که در این کتاب از طریق ساخت و سپس بازسازیِ موزهٔ ملّی ایران توضیح داده میشود، در تاریخ معاصر ایران دوبار تلاشِ بیحاصلی انجام شد برای رسیدن به درکی یکپارچه از وطن که فقط بر پایهٔ یکی از این دو انگاره استوار باشد. نتیجه آنکه وطن همچون مفهومی ناپایدار و مبهم باقی ماند.
This is the translation to Persian of my book Forming National Identity in Iran (I.B. Tauris 2014).
This book analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural desig... more This book analyses the use of the past and the production of heritage through architectural design in the developmental context of Iran, a country that has endured radical cultural and political shifts in the past five decades. Offering a trans-disciplinary approach toward complex relationship between architecture, development, and heritage, Mozaffari and Westbrook suggest that transformations in developmental contexts like Iran must be seen in relation to global political and historical exchanges, as well as the specificities of localities.
The premise of the book is that development has been a globalizing project that originated in the West. Transposed into other contexts, this project instigates a renewed historical consciousness and imagination of the past. The authors explore the rise of this consciousness in architecture, examining the theoretical context to the debates, international exchanges made in architectural congresses in the 1970s, the use of housing as the vehicle for everyday heritage, and forms of symbolic public architecture that reflect monumental time.
HERITAGE MOVEMENTS IN ASIA Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity, 2020
Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. T... more Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place. By bringing social movements into heritage studies, the book advocates a shift of perspective in understanding heritage, one that is no longer bound by (at times arbitrary) divisions such as those assumed between the state and people or between experts and non-experts.
REVIEWS “This book significantly contributes to our understanding of the complexities of heritage in Asia. It broadens our horizons to look at issues of governance, state-society relations, and the institutional ways memory and material culture are politically negotiated. It reveals heritage as a series of movements, unpacking, elaborating and critiquing what that term means in different social settings. An exciting contribution to the examination of heritage in Asia.” • Tim Winter, University of Western Australia, Professor of Critical Heritage studies, Author of Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century
“The book is a wake-up call for heritage practitioners who still too easily think of the material past as a static and unmediated record of times past. Heritage Movements in Asia reminds us that the heritage expert is only one among numerous players competing to inscribe meaning on the traces of the past embedded in the ground we all live on. As this book vividly illustrates, heritage activism, whether in the form of mass mobilisation or more intimate engagements, is what gives the material past its dynamism.” • Denis Byrne, Author of Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia
“Looking at heritage processes through the lens of social movements, this volume adds a meaningful contribution to the growing literature of critical heritage studies.” • Neel Kamal Chapagain, Director of the Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University
Pasargadae is the location of the tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Thro... more Pasargadae is the location of the tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Through the ages it was Islamised and the tomb was ascribed to the Mother of Solomon. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that archaeological evidence demonstrated the relationship between the site and Cyrus and it was appropriated into conflicting political discourses on nationalism and Islamism while concurrently acknowledged as a national and then a World Heritages site. However, Pasargadae is neither an isolated World Heritage site, nor purely a symbol of abstract state politics. Pasargadae and its immediate vicinity constitute a living landscape occupied by villagers, nomads and tourists.
This edited volume presents for the first time a broad, multi-disciplinary examination of Pasargadae by experts from both outside and within Iran. It specifically focuses on those disciplines that are absent from existing studies, such as ethnography, tourism and museum studies providing valuable insights into this fascinating place. In conclusion, the book argues that to understand World Heritage sites and their problems fully, a holistic approach should be adopted, which considers the manifold of perspectives and issues and it puts forward a novel approach to the question of heritage, representation and construction of collective identity from the framework of place.
Modern Iran is a country with two significant but competing discourses of national identity, one ... more Modern Iran is a country with two significant but competing discourses of national identity, one stemming from ancient pre-Islamic customs and mythology, the other from Islamic Shiite practices and beliefs. This has left an often confused notion of identity in Iran. Ali Mozaffari explores the complex processes involved in the formation of Iranian national identity, laying particular stress upon the importance of place to ideas of homeland and the creation of a collective national identity. He illustrates his arguments through an analysis of the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persepolis and the Shiite rituals of Moharram. In a concluding part, he extends his analysis to the Ancient Iran Museum and the Islamic Period Museum, housed in the National Museum of Iran. An important work that offers powerful insights into the forces shaping national identity in Iran.
We first wrote and presented an early version of this work to the Peripheral Modernisms Internat... more We first wrote and presented an early version of this work to the Peripheral Modernisms International Conference held at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London in March 2012. Since that time, our position has developed, and we have used the research material and the insights gained, some of which are articulated here, in other works (see Mozaffari and Westbrook 2014, 2020, 2022). The question of peripherality, however, remains important in that it forces us to think in terms of global exchanges rather than, purely in terms of resistance and the parochialism and distortions that this may entail.
---
This collection of essays reappraises the contributions made by modernist movements from regions generally regarded as peripheral or semi-peripheral to a global aesthetic of Modernism. It particularly focuses on European semi-peripheries, combining theoretical chapters and individual case studies to examine the cultural and aesthetic complexities of so-called peripheral modernisms. Contributing to research on the ‘transnational turn’ in New Modernist Studies, the volume takes recent scholarship on postcolonial modernisms one step further by exploring a broader geopolitical expanse than the (formerly) colonised regions under global capitalism. It highlights the local and translocal specificities of modernist movements from regions such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean to offer new insights into the concept of global modernism.
The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction, 2023
In this chapter, we will present an overview of heritage destruction types and their causes in th... more In this chapter, we will present an overview of heritage destruction types and their causes in the Caucasus and elaborate on some specific examples. Heritage destruction has been committed by multiple groups in the Caucasus and under various circumstances, but generally following three themes: motivations, sources, and instruments or means. Most types of heritage destruction in the Caucasus are linked to issues of genocide and ethnocide. Importantly, heritage destruction in this context is changing, with outright destruction now being replaced with alteration of sites to deny the heritage claims of ethnic rivals. In this chapter, the authors will begin the discussion with brief information about the historical and geographical background of the region and the forms of heritage that are present. Within this region, we will dedicate additional attention to the case of the Armenia-Azerbaijan heritage conflicts on the grounds that this is the latest iteration of a major conflict that incorporates the three typologies.
Islamic Pasts and Heritage Presents, Edited by Trinidad Rico, Jun 2017
From the 1960s, Iran, like many other similar countries experienced a radical urban expansion and... more From the 1960s, Iran, like many other similar countries experienced a radical urban expansion and industrialization, chiefly as a result of the expanding oil industry. Internal migration fuelled by industrialization created both a crisis of habitation and a cultural dissonance, in response to which various schemes were developed for model communities, intended to bridge the gap between Iranian culture, its heritage and modern urbanism. We will examine one such ‘model community’, New Shushtar, a housing complex adjacent to the ancient heritage town of Shushtar, in which architectural motifs and images were used to evoke and perhaps invoke authentic traditional life. We will place this complex within the broader context in the Muslim world of attempts to defend regional culture from the effects of globalisation.
Citation:
Mozaffari, Ali, and Nigel Westbrook. 2017. “Reclaiming Heritage Through the Image of Traditional Habitat.” In The Making of Islamic Heritage: Muslim Pasts and Heritage Presents, edited by Trinidad Rico, 47–65. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
World Heritage in Iran: Perspectives on Pasargadae, Dec 2014
This chapter proposes and illustrates a conceptual approach to the World Heritage site of Pasarga... more This chapter proposes and illustrates a conceptual approach to the World Heritage site of Pasargadae through the idea of place
Heritage conservation and civilisational competition in the South Caucasus: the Blue Mosque of Yerevan and the Govhar Agha Mosque in Shusha, 2024
This paper explores the role of cultural heritage in shaping competing civilisational identities ... more This paper explores the role of cultural heritage in shaping competing civilisational identities amid the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. As its case studies, it focuses on the relatively recent restorations of two significant mosques, the Blue Mosque in Yerevan (capital of Armenia) and the Govhar Agha Mosque in Shusha (capital of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan), respectively. Referring to primary references in Persian, Azerbaijani, Turkish, Armenian, and Russian, the paper elaborates historical, cultural, and political narratives surrounding these edifices and their restorations. This situates heritage conservation within the South Caucasus’s intricate historical and geopolitical landscape. Within this context, the function of heritage extends beyond national cultural symbolism. Responding to a transnational dimension, heritage functions as an instrument in geopolitical manoeuvring by both Armenia and Azerbaijan and in relation to rising and influential regional powers, Iran, and Turkey. Here the distinct function of heritage is shaping civilisational identities: it projects scales beyond the nation-state and is integral to various other forms of bilateral and multilateral agreements, including military and economic. As such, disputes over these two heritage sites and others like them, echo broader geopolitical and civilisational tensions at regional scales. Thus, heritage is at once the battleground for national-territorial and civilisational claims.
In this paper, we examine the use of intangible cultural heritage as a vehicle for soft power in ... more In this paper, we examine the use of intangible cultural heritage as a vehicle for soft power in the service of geostrategic competitions between Iran and Turkey, two regional powers in West Asia. We focus on two significant trans-regional instances of intangible cultural heritage relevant to both countries: the mystic poet Rumi and the New Year's celebration of Nowruz. We draw on theories in political science and cultrual heritage as well as a host of sources in Persian, Turkish, and Azerbaijani, to demonstrate how heritage is mobilised concurrently as a nation-building device and a tool for soft power in international relations. We conclude by suggesting that, despite strong grounds for its claims, Iran's response in this competition has been reactive rather than proactive. Overall, the paper contributes to the scholarship on soft power and heritage diplomacy by presenting the first comparative analysis of cases of shared intangible heritage in West Asia.
This is a persian article written on the basis of our edited book with Tod Jones, "HERITAGE MOVEM... more This is a persian article written on the basis of our edited book with Tod Jones, "HERITAGE MOVEMENTS IN ASIA: Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity" (Berghahn 2020). It is meant for a special issue on critical heritage in the Persian architecture and urbanism journal, Abadi.
This article explores Iran’s soft power appeal in Azerbaijan following Azerbaijan’s independence ... more This article explores Iran’s soft power appeal in Azerbaijan following Azerbaijan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It first reviews the state of the field and situates Iran’s overall soft power strategies in relation to that context and then focuses on the relationship between Iran and post-independence Azerbaijan. Drawing on a rich array of material, including the latest publications in Persian, the article explores Tehran’s exercise of soft power in Azerbaijan in three key spheres: education, culture, and religion. The article argues that although Iran has invested significant resources in the promotion of its soft power in Azerbaijan, it has encountered significant hurdles in exercising that influence. Azerbaijan resists such influence and, at times, pursues certain anti-Iranian policies. Thus, the divide between the two countries, despite all historical and cultural commonalities remains firmly in place.
International Journal of Environmental Studies, 2022
Architecture is the meeting point of development, culture, and the environment. Development usual... more Architecture is the meeting point of development, culture, and the environment. Development usually challenges traditions and leads to environmental and cultural concerns. In the 1970s public architecture in Iran played a significant role in re-imagining a national cultural landscape. The paper examines the Beaux Arts-trained architect Houshang Seyhoun's (1964-68) design for the reconstructed mausoleum of Ferdowsi, the Iranian national poet. The design consisted of an interpretative gallery, tea-house, and performance space as well as an adjacent restaurant. This was one of the many public projects that went through multiple stages of life from the time of its conception through to the Islamic Revolution, which substantially transformed its social and political context leading to the present. The paper attempts to show the divergent political forces that operate on perceptions of a cultural landscape at a national scale.
Keywords: Ferdowsi, Seyhoun, Iranian architecture, cultural landscape
This paper probes the process of heritage production in
documentary films with a specific focus o... more This paper probes the process of heritage production in documentary films with a specific focus on the documentary film Taq Kasra Wonder of Architecture (Akbarzadeh 2018), which tells the story of the pre-Islamic Persian/Iranian historical site of Taq Kasra (the Arch of Ctesiphon), presently located in Iraq. The paper situates the film within a broader context of documentaries about Persian edifices in the region and draws on primary interview material with the documentary maker Pejman Akbarzadeh. Through its analyses, the paper shows how, especially in the Iranian setting, a documentary film can engage and (re)produce heritage, and how, when compared to that setting, Taq Kasra exposes persistent aspects of cultural politics within the Islamic Republic since its establishment after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and Saddam Hussein’s policies. In doing so, it is argued that the film provides a mode of critical enquiry into heritage in current historical and political circumstances in Iran. The paper addresses a lacuna in both critical heritage and film studies, namely, the analysis and interpretation of the making of heritage in film and as film.
The paper talks about the relationship between global exchanges, pressures of the Cold War and th... more The paper talks about the relationship between global exchanges, pressures of the Cold War and the invention of the imaginary called Islamic Architecture in its contemporary (thus modern) rendition.
On 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan went to war with Armenia on a scale not seen since the ceasefire... more On 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan went to war with Armenia on a scale not seen since the ceasefire of 1994. The conflict ended in another ceasefire on 10 November 2020, however, in addition to the theatre of war, the conflict has been prosecuted and continues to be fought post-ceasefire, through claims to cultural heritage which are employed in international organisations to substantiate the legitimacy of territorial claims. In this paper, we specifically focus on carpets and their display in museums to unpack the relationship between carpet as an instance of instrumentalised cultural heritage and the two countries' territorial conflict and claims. Focusing on two major carpet museums in Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh (Shusha) and Azerbaijan (Baku), respectively, we will explain how ostensibly innocuous claims of cultural ownership and authenticity underline territorial claims with violent outcomes.
An effort to use a strategic-interaction language of players and arenas, including typical resear... more An effort to use a strategic-interaction language of players and arenas, including typical research questions posed, to conflicts over heritage.
This Forum evolved from a provocation by the Editors of this special issue of Fabrications that “... more This Forum evolved from a provocation by the Editors of this special issue of Fabrications that “too often heritage conservation assumes an apolitical stance by neglecting to acknowledge its own unsettling agendas.” The Forum's five contributors highlight a range of challenges and trends that architectural heritage professionals – including historians – have begun to identify and engage with in a critical fashion. These pieces demonstrate the need to commit to historical practice that embraces the “critical turn,” and to acknowledge our responsibilities as “gatekeepers” and producers of knowledge. While we cannot control the multitude of interpretations that our work will surely generate across time and space, we can consider whether we are contributing to, or challenging, existing silences, inaccuracies, and regimes of knowledge. This Forum does not claim to provide answers, but instead seeks to foster discussion and identify some of the avenues along which work in the general realm of “Architecture / Heritage / Politics” is – or should be – progressing.
While contests and conflicts are well recognized in heritage
research, analysis of the specific c... more While contests and conflicts are well recognized in heritage research, analysis of the specific circumstances and dilemmas that individuals and groups face when pursuing heritage goals and partaking in heritage contests can benefit from further methodological work. This paper presents a case and method for incorporating concepts from an emerging interactionist perspective on social movements into heritage research in order to better conceptualize and analyze the interactions and processes through which collective identity and heritage is coproduced. We examine the political and interpretive processes at the heart of heritage research, consider areas in which the language and concepts of social movements addresses existing gaps and disagreements, and identify a set of questions that will open new perspectives on heritage movements and contests. We apply these questions to a heritage contest over the World Heritage site of Pasargadae in Iran, emphasizing how heritage activists advanced their perspectives and claims, eventually leading to the incorporation of Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage within the official Islamic republic discourse.
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2018
For the first decade after its victory, the Iranian revolution (1979) was dominated by an uncompr... more For the first decade after its victory, the Iranian revolution (1979) was dominated by an uncompromising Islamist ideology, invoking the Islamic and vernacular traditions. A logical arena through which Islamism could act upon people’s daily lives was public housing, the design and construction of which is controlled by the government, and its constituents are the masses who mostly adhere to Muslim traditions and espouse forms of Islamic identity in their daily life. Referring to a selection of projects from a series of government housing competitions held in 1986, we examine the relationship between the submitted designs and architectural precedents cited as constituting “Islamic architectural heritage.” Elaborating on the heritage processes involved in articulating the past in these designs, we trace the interrelationships between these designs and other, non-Islamic, architectural discourses and design procedures deriving from a Western context. We argue for rethinking the relationship between heritage and architectural design, such that the latter is seen as the process of refashioning fragments of past traditions into heritage, in this case, a purportedly Islamic form. Concurrently, we show the gap between ideological rhetoric and the praxis of design and remarkable continuities between the periods leading up to and following the revolution.
This paper probes the relationship between visual representations and visitation practices at Pas... more This paper probes the relationship between visual representations and visitation practices at Pasargadae, a UNESCO World Heritage site in southern Iran. Presenting a systematic analysis of publicly available online images of Pasargadae, the paper examines the complex relationship between the place and its visual representations. Through analysis, the paper elaborates on a sense of intimacy that, while grounding Pasargadae, is also a potential common ground in pre-Islamic heritage in which the Iranian state and society could at once meet and contest versions of identity. Examining this relationship facilitates reflections into both heritage and the peculiarities of its visual representation in the Iranian context.
This is a different, translated version of our Chapter in the book: Tourism and Political Change ... more This is a different, translated version of our Chapter in the book: Tourism and Political Change (Second Edition), edited by Richard Butler and Wantanee Suntikul, published by Good fellow publishers (http://bit.ly/2plhqLp).
The idea of the world transmuted and reprojected as image to the modern subject lies at the heart... more The idea of the world transmuted and reprojected as image to the modern subject lies at the heart of this paper, which addresses the relation between international debates on housing and cultural identity in the early 1970s, and the project for a new town at Shushtar, Iran. We position this paper in relation to the origins of the discourse of 'critical regionalism', a 'leftist' reaction to the homogenising effects of global capital on local communities, and a discourse through which certain architectural theorists sought to position place, identity and region as significant factors in the reformation of a modern, and ethically motivated architectural practice (this became known as critical regionalism with its main proponents being Tzonis and Lefaivre (Die Frage des Regionalismus; The Grid and the Pathway; Critical Regionalism), Kenneth Frampton (Towards a Critical Regionalism; Prospects for a Critical Regionalism), and William Curtis (Modern Architecture;Towards an Authentic Regionalism) and its critics include Alan Colquhoun (Kritik am Regionalismus; Critique of Regionalism; The Concept of Regionalism) and Keith Eggener (Placing Resistence: A Critique of Critical Regionalism). Evolving from a Gramscian project of transforming institutions from within, its most recent forms are focused on the impossible challenge of transmitting authenticity through the individual creative act (Hartoonian, Critical Regionalism: Whatever Happened to Autonomy?). Preceding this discourse were several strands of counter-critique within architectural theory and practice, notably la Tendenze in Italy, Ungers' theorization of an urbanism of meaningful fragments, or 'urban islands', and members of the Team X group's assertion of the rights of urban residents to a culturally meaningful network of buildings and urban spaces. Reconstructing the city through the establishment of an organic relation between individual dwelling and community was a critical concept in the theorization of a socially-relevant architecture in the 1960s to the 1970s in the form of both treatises like Rossi'sThe Architecture of the City, and in speculative and actual projects, notably Gregotti's Quartier Zen in Palermo (1970), Ungers' Roosevelt Island project (1975), Aymonino's Gallaratese Quarter (1967-74) and Siza's Quinta da Malagueira settlement (1973). Underpinning all these projects was both a dismissal of the subjugation of the housing complex to larger abstract planning structures (or 'naive functionalism' (Rossi, 46 ff.), in which building form was secondary to abstract zoning diagrams, and an apparent belief in the ability of architectural typologies to provide the scaffolding for authentic forms of social life to develop. Social housing was to be the constructive material out of which emplaced communities could evolve. Inherent to this project was the projection of images of authenticity. In the Second International Congress of Architects held in Persepolis Iran in 1974, entitled Towards a Quality of Life-the Role of Industrialization in the Architecture and Urban Planning of Developing Countries, this project of authenticity informed the agenda – many of the leading international theorists and practitioners debated the issues pertaining to regional culture, social identity, human habitat, and the internal economic migration then being faced in Iran. In his presentation Leonardo Benevolo, the eminent Italian postwar architectural and urban historian, discussed the current situation in Iranian towns, where the poor are not visible, as in the South American Favelas, but are hidden in the old historic cores. He noted that with increased migration to cities, this situation could not continue indefinitely, and a longer term solution needed to be found, both in relation to housing standards, and preservation of historic heritage (Benevolo 249). This position accorded with that of the Iranian delegate and leading local architect Kamran Diba, whose practice had already undertaken a series of urban design projects for regional cities (Mozaffari, interview), and would be commissioned in the following year to design a new town adjacent to the historic town of Shushtar, in Khuzestan province, SouthWestern Iran. This 'model project' will form the focus of
This paper was translated by Ramin Karimian and published in Goft-o-Goo Journal. The attached fil... more This paper was translated by Ramin Karimian and published in Goft-o-Goo Journal. The attached file is a sample of pages in Persian. Here is the bibliographic detail: Mozaffari, Ali. 2015. "Ehraz HoviyyatL Barrasi Jonbeshhaye Miras-e Tarikhi dar Rasanehaye Omoomi." Goft-o-Goo Summer (67):83-103.
"Shiites believe that, Hussein the younger grandson of Prophet Muhammad, whose right to the ... more "Shiites believe that, Hussein the younger grandson of Prophet Muhammad, whose right to the caliphate was usurped by Yazid; was invited to Kufa in Iraq to lead an uprising against Yazid. However, on the 10th of Muharram, the first month of lunar calendar, before reaching Kufa, he was betrayed by his citizens, confronted by Yazid and beheaded along with a large number of his family and followers. Every year, this event is commemorated as Ashura (the tenth day) amongst Shiites and is the climax of a 40-day-long festival that brings a temporary suspension to the everyday life of their cities. The festival includes regular nightly processions, religious sermons, and usually culminates in a Shiite Passion Play called the Taazieh, the length of which may vary between three to twelve days. This period is an opportunity for the city’s elite to show their status by patronage. Traditionally the regular processions of Hussein’s mourners go through designated paths thus revealing an otherwise hidden hierarchy of places in the fabric of the city. They pass through a series of religious spaces and the houses of the city’s noblemen, some of whom hold Passion plays in their courts. The web of spaces demarcated by the processions, reveal the other morphology of the city, i.e. that of the intangible. A transient morphology of the city is therefore constructed through the interaction of three forces: religious festival, the spaces and paths that relate to this festival, and the imaginative recovery as means of keeping tradition alive. In this paper, I will first clarify a notion of morphology of the event and then after elaborating on Ashura and examining the scholarship on Islamic cities, will explicate a notion of tradition as a context for such acts of recovery, then elaborate within the context of the above three forces the importance of spaces of festival which will make eloquent the importance of the intangible morphology in a traditional city."
In the current period of crisis in the Islamic world, it may be timely to ask the question: what ... more In the current period of crisis in the Islamic world, it may be timely to ask the question: what is the contemporary ‘product’ of Islamic/Islamist thinking within the discourse of architecture? In this paper, we focus on the theme of culturally suitable housing in Iran as it evolved in the period immediately before and after the revolution stoked by Ayatollah Khomeini that led to the creation of the Islamic Republic. We examine and compare firstly the principles underlying model housing developments of the mid-1970s, notably Kamran Diba’s “Learning from Isfahan” in his Shushtar No’w housing complex, and then examples that emerged from housing competitions in Iran that reflected the evolving discourse of architecture after the Islamic revolution, when overt emphasis was placed upon the need to create an authentic habitat that respects local traditions, culture and religious beliefs. Referencing the ‘golden’ tradition of past arts and architecture which was held to be constitutive of ...
Reconstructing the city through the establishment of an organic relation between individual dwell... more Reconstructing the city through the establishment of an organic relation between individual dwelling and community was a critical concept in the theorization of a socially-relevant architecture in the 1960s to 70s in the form of both treatises like Rossi’s The Architecture of the City, and in speculative and actual projects, such as Gregotti’s Quartier Zen in Palermo (1970), Ungers’ Roosevelt Island project (1975), Aymonino’s Gallaratese Quarter (1967-74) and Siza’s Quinta da Malagueira settlement (1973). Underpinning all these projects was both a dismissal of the subjugation of the housing complex to larger abstract planning structures (‘naive functionalism’, as Rossi put it), and an apparent belief in the ability of architectural typologies to provide the scaffolding for authentic forms of social life to develop. Meanwhile, in the Second International Congress of Architects held in Persepolis Iran in 1974, entitled ‘Towards a Quality of Life’, many of the leading international architectural theorists and practitioners debated issues pertaining to the problems inherent to social identity, human habitat, and the internal economic migration then being faced in Iran, but also familiar to Europeans since the early post-war period, and previously addressed in ‘Realist’ projects such as Ridolfi and Quaroni’s Tiburtino estate outside Rome (1949-54). Growing out of this conference was the Persepolis Declaration, a formulation on principles to underly human settlement, that was to form the basis for the 1976 Vancouver Declaration on Habitat. Among the recommendations of the Congress was the design and construction of several exemplary settlements that would form models for future housing, notably the Aga Kahn prize-winning Shushtar No’w (New Town), designed by the Queen’s cousin, Kamran Diba. In this paper we will examine this project in relation to the conference principles and will interrogate the following questions: can it be understood as a local search for cultural traditions and essences, or for international precedents and narratives that can be reshaped in a local context? How are the two negotiated?
CELEBRATION: The 22nd Annual SAHANZ Conference Proceedings, 2005
Shiites believe that, Hussein the younger grandson of Prophet Muhammad, whose right to the caliph... more Shiites believe that, Hussein the younger grandson of Prophet Muhammad, whose right to the caliphate was usurped by Yazid; was invited to Kufa in Iraq to lead an uprising against Yazid. However, on the 10th of Muharram, the first month of lunar calendar, before reaching Kufa, he was betrayed by his citizens, confronted by Yazid and beheaded along with a large number of his family and followers. Every year, this event is commemorated as Ashura (the tenth day) amongst Shiites and is the climax of a 40-day-long festival that brings a temporary suspension to the everyday life of their cities. The festival includes regular nightly processions, religious sermons, and usually culminates in a Shiite Passion Play called the Taazieh, the length of which may vary between three to twelve days. This period is an opportunity for the city’s elite to show their status by patronage. Traditionally the regular processions of Hussein’s mourners go through designated paths thus revealing an otherwise hidden hierarchy of places in the fabric of the city. They pass through a series of religious spaces and the houses of the city’s noblemen, some of whom hold Passion plays in their courts. The web of spaces demarcated by the processions, reveal the other morphology of the city, i.e. that of the intangible.
A transient morphology of the city is therefore constructed through the interaction of three forces: religious festival, the spaces and paths that relate to this festival, and the imaginative recovery as means of keeping tradition alive. In this paper, I will first clarify a notion of morphology of the event and then after elaborating on Ashura and examining the scholarship on Islamic cities, will explicate a notion of tradition as a context for such acts of recovery, then elaborate within the context of the above three forces the importance of spaces of festival which will make eloquent the importance of the intangible morphology in a traditional city.
This is the program of a workshop and public film screening event due to be held at the National ... more This is the program of a workshop and public film screening event due to be held at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne on 30-31 January 2019. Event curated by Ali Mozaffari Workshop co-conveners: Ali Mozaffari and David Harvey Film directed by Pejman Akbarzadeh
Heritage is an imaginative cultural process. Any activity that invokes, appropriates, or reinvent... more Heritage is an imaginative cultural process. Any activity that invokes, appropriates, or reinvents the past engages in the production of heritage. A central feature of such activities is circulation and exchange through time and through places. Indeed, it is processes of exchange-understood in and interpreted in broad terms-that creates specific manifestations of heritage, by which we designate difference and identity. These relationships of exchange involving circulations of material objects as well as ideas, transmigration of practices, habits and tastes also work on various scales engaging individuals as well as cultural norms, customs as well as domestic and international laws and legal frameworks and institutional machinations. As such it pertains to various areas from diplomacy to domestic power, from individual pursuits to collective action. With this in mind, this panel invites papers that examine the processes of heritage production, the relationship between heritage and its milieu, and the relationships between heritage and other forces at play. Specific questions include but are not limited to:
Submission deadline: 1 November 2015
Deadline for abstracts submission: 1 November 2015
Conferenc... more Submission deadline: 1 November 2015 Deadline for abstracts submission: 1 November 2015 Conference: Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference 2016 Location and date: Montreal, Canada, 6-10 June 2016
Session Title: Activism, Civil Society and Heritage Session type: Regular paper session, open Description: Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. Since the late 1980s, the phenomenon of contestation in heritage has been increasingly recognised. However, there is still little detailed and situated knowledge about the range of actors present in contestations, the variety of strategies they pursue, the reasoning behind their choices, the networks they develop, and how from all this, heritage has been and is constructed. More often than not, contestation appears to be essentialised as occurring between the ‘state’ (often treated as a monolith) and the people or the community (such as certain uses of the idea of Authorised Heritage Discourse in Uses of Heritage). Following this trend, much of the growing body of scholarship on heritage has tended to assume universalising theoretical positions based on limited, specific contexts, thus somewhat compromising the ability to draw nuanced and theoretical positions that take into account the diversity of contexts within which heritage is produced. This panel acknowledges the emerging trends in heritage studies which take into account what may be described as relational aspects of heritage construction, such as those inspired by Deleuze, which examine heritage in terms of assemblages (Harrison 2013), Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (Krauss 2008), or other approaches that are increasingly considering heritage as part of human, material and social flows. The premise of this panel is that heritage is constructed, contested, and negotiated through actions of players or actors and within traceable places and spaces (arenas) through the course of time. Of interest here are the mechanisms of heritage construction and contestation as well as the conceptual and theoretical perspectives that may drive interpretation of realities on the ground. The panel is open to scholars from any field of enquiry. We invite contributors to focus on different aspects of heritage in diverse areas to examine questions including but not limited to the following: • Activism is not limited to individuals. A player in heritage may be an individual, a compound player such as an NGO, or even a state entity such as a heritage organisation with divergent internal perspectives. Who is a heritage activist? How do activists identify themselves? • How does the material turn in social sciences, with its recognition of the role of non-human actors and distributed agency, transform our understanding of contentious heritage? • What is the micro-politics of heritage in social movements including preservationist movements? • What is the relationship between heritage and individual or collective activism? • How does activism change heritage and how does heritage change activism? • How does engagement with media transform heritage? What are the preferred modes of communication and media for heritage and why? What does the preference tell us about the relationship between civil society, public sphere and heritage? • How and why is heritage transformed into a cause? • How does advocacy for heritage manifest itself? • Where does contestation take place? And why? • What is the role of space and place in forms of contesting heritage? Does contestation lead to new definitions and experiences of place and space? At what scales? • Other questions that may explore the relationship between agency, materiality, affect and heritage will also be considered. Conveners: Dr Ali Mozaffari, Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University (email: a.mozaffari@curtin.edu.au) Ali Mozaffari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the founding co-editor of Berghahn series Explorations in Heritage Studies. His publications include: • Mozaffari, A. 2014. Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place. London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. • Mozaffari, A. ed. 2014. World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae. London, UK: Ashgate. • Mozaffari, Ali. 2015. “The Heritage ‘NGO’: A Case Study on the Role of Grass Roots Heritage Societies in Iran and Their Perception of Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (9). doi:10.1080/13527258.2015.1028961.
Dr Tod Jones, Department of Geography and Planning, School of Built Environment, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University (email:t.jones@curtin.edu.au) Tod Jones is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography. His publications include: • Jones, T. S. 2013. Culture, Power and Authoritarianism in the Indonesian State. Cultural Policy Across the Twentieth Century to the Reform Era. Netherlands: Brill. • Jones, T. S., and M. Talebian. 2014. “Perspectives and Prospects for Cultural Tourism in the Pasargadae Religion.” In World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae, ed. Ali Mozaffari, 155-172. England: Ashgate Publishing Limited. • Jones, T. S., and C. L. Birdsall Jones. 2014. “Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions.”International Journal of Cultural Policy 20 (3): 296-317.
Call for Abstracts
Deadline for abstracts submission: 1 November 2015
Conference: Association of ... more Call for Abstracts Deadline for abstracts submission: 1 November 2015 Conference: Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference 2016 Location and date: Montreal, Canada, 6-10 June 2016 Session title Heritage and Liminality: cross-cultural and inter disciplinary perspectives on liminality and cultural heritage Session Type Regular papers, open Session Description Heritage has multiple, concurrent origins. It is performed and produced by individuals, groups and organisations, or institutions on various scales. It is a transformative process and thus closely connected to the transitional. In heritage transitionality may be usefully conceptualised under the rubric of the liminal, which at its core anticipates change and transformation, structure-agency relationships, affect, and human experience – all significant issues in recent theoretical debates in the field. Various individuals, groups, institutions and even countries can create, attempt to control or contest liminality. Examining heritage in light of liminality can pertain to interrogating notions of transition, boundary and border zones and their manifestations and constructions as well as the actors who construct them and their possible intentions in both quotidian and exceptional times. Additionally, new insights may be drawn about understanding spatial and temporal transitions between heritage sites and landscapes and spaces of everyday life or the structure of experiencing a heritage place. In coupling liminality and heritage, the panel ultimately pursues a two-fold objective: to develop a better or different understanding of heritage through the use of liminality, and to explore the potential contribution of heritage to understandings of liminality in the present. Authors are invited to analyse the relationship between heritage and liminality in their multiple forms. The panel cuts through a number of conference themes and welcomes papers from multiple disciplines including geography, architecture, anthropology, sociology, tourism studies and politics. Both theoretical and case-based studies with theoretical implications will be considered. Possible topics of investigation include but are not limited to the following interrelated aspects: 1. Time and temporality – how thresholds and liminal zones change over time and how is the transition experienced by various groups and/or individuals? 1.1. What are the temporal qualities of thresholds in relation to places? 1.2. What are the temporal differences between liminal zones and their immediate surroundings? 1.3. How, when and by whom are they constructed as thresholds? 1.4. How do thresholds and transitions transform in time and what are the causes for their transformation? 1.5. How is the question of time related to other tangible or intangible aspects of experiencing heritage? 2. Narrative 2.1. What are the narratives of entering/transitioning for various groups of people? 2.2. How are experiences narrated on a quotidian basis and how does that narrative differ in other times? 2.3. At a more local scale, what are the various narratives of entering, border zones and thresholds and how do they interact? 2.4. Performance 2.5. How, when and why are transitions performed? 2.6. What kind of performances and actions create, keep or dissolve a liminal state at various scales: in relation to a locale (as in entering and exiting) or in set of intangible institutional structures that operate at multiple scales? 3. Place 3.1. How is liminality created, controlled or contested in place? 3.2. Who are the actors (individuals, collectives or institutions) who create or resist liminality? 4. Embodiment and concretization 4.1. What are the symbolic (visual, structural and other forms) markers of such zones? 4.2. How do they appear and how are they constructed in their settings (urban, architectural, landscape)? 4.3. How does historical transformation of the setting influence the construction of a liminal zone and vice versa? A selection of papers will be considered for inclusion in an academic publication.
Session Conveners • Dr Ali Mozaffari, Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute, Curtin University Ali Mozaffari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the founding co-editor of Berghahn series: Explorations in Heritage Studies. His publications include: Mozaffari, A. 2014. Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place. London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. Mozaffari, A. ed. 2014. World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae. London, Uk: Ashgate. Mozaffari, Ali. 2015. “The Heritage ‘NGO’: A Case Study on the Role of Grass Roots Heritage Societies in Iran and Their Perception of Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (9). Doi:10.1080/13527258.2015.1028961.
Associate Professor Nigel Westbrook, School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, University of Western Australia Associate Professor Westbrook is Associate Dean of Research at the School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts. His latest publications include: Westbrook, N.B. 2014, 'The palace hall of Chrysotriklinos as an example of emulation and contestation in the early Byzantine period.', Third EAHN International Meeting, Torino, Italy, 1, pp. 666-682. Westbrook, N.B. 2014, 'The regionalist debate in the context of the 1970s architectural forums in Iran', Translation, Auckland, New Zealand, 31, pp. 385-400. Contact Details Please and contact Dr Ali Mozaffari (email: a.mozaffari@curtin.edu.au) is in the first instance. All proposals should be submitted to the conference website for adjudication.
Explorations in Heritage Studies responds directly to the rapid growth of heritage scholarship an... more Explorations in Heritage Studies responds directly to the rapid growth of heritage scholarship and recognizes the trans-disciplinary nature of research in this area, as reflected in the wide-ranging fields, such as archaeology, geography, anthropology and ethnology, digital heritage, heritage management, conservation theory, physical science, architecture, history, tourism and planning. With a blurring of boundaries between art and science, theory and practice, culture and nature, the volumes in the series balance theoretical and empirical research, and often challenge dominant assumptions in theory and practice.
Series Editors:
Ali Mozaffari, Curtin University (a.mozaffari@curtin.edu.au) David Harvey, University of Exeter (d.c.harvey@exeter.ac.uk) Editorial Board: Erik Champion, Curtin University Mads Daugbjerg, Aarhus University Elisa Giaccardi, Technical University of Delft Rodney Harrison, University College London Simon Knell, University of Leicester Daniel Laven, Mid Sweden University Iain Robertson, University of Gloucestershire Gunhild Setten, Norwegian University of Science & Technology Marie Luise Stig Sorensen, Cambridge University James Taylor, Imperial War Museum Heather Viles, University of Oxford Andrea Witcomb, Deakin University
Brief Description
This collection of essays is the first to examine contemporary heritage movemen... more Brief Description This collection of essays is the first to examine contemporary heritage movements in Asia. The volume draws on concepts of Social Movements Theory as well as recent fieldwork to present fresh research and new perspectives on heritage and activism in various parts of the Asian continent. Heritage movements are responses by public and privately constituted groups to some of the global challenges of late modernity including nationalism, pluralism, state-society relations and the influence of a growing middle class. Much of the growing body of scholarship on heritage is concerned either with specific contexts or with broader historical and theoretical issues at the expense of contextual specificities. The book adds a new dimension to existing scholarship in the field of heritage by embracing a broader idea of Asia which includes south and central Asia and therefore the hitherto absent Muslim context. It thus contains countries such as Iran and Afghanistan as well as Indonesia. Additionally, focussing on emerging heritage movements in various contexts, the volume in its totality explores and articulates the applicability Social Movements Theory to this new context – an aspect that has hitherto received little attention. In conclusion the book reveals the subtleties and differences in current heritage movements and the emergent identities and social challenges in their host societies, while highlighting the shared underlying processes with regard to their engagement with and use of heritage.
The recent war between two of Iran’s northern neighbours has left the Islamic Republic in a probl... more The recent war between two of Iran’s northern neighbours has left the Islamic Republic in a problematic position. If the current status quo remains, Azerbaijan will be able to exercise an increasing influence across the border inside Iran.
As Iran's new president takes the helm, general mismanagement, widespread corruption, nepotism an... more As Iran's new president takes the helm, general mismanagement, widespread corruption, nepotism and outright incompetence are among major causes of crises in the Islamic Republic.
Ebrahim Raisi was announced as the winner of the 2021 Iranian Presidential Election within 12 hou... more Ebrahim Raisi was announced as the winner of the 2021 Iranian Presidential Election within 12 hours of polls closing, in what many commentators saw as an engineered victory. But Raisi’s successful election was not always a done deal, and the Chief Justice was not always the leadership’s preferred choice to succeed Hassan Rouhani.
In this episode, Dr James Barry summarises the election campaign, looking at how the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 caused a crisis for the government, and the ways in which Raisi’s rivals were removed in the lead-up to the election over the past two months. In the second half, Dr Barry is joined on the panel by Dr Ali Mozaffari to discuss what sort of leader Raisi will be, what the participation rate tells us about public attitudes to voting in Iran, and what this election means in a larger political and historical context.
The Iran Election 1400 is a weekly podcast produced for he Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. The Series is hosted by Dr Jame Barry and covers the developments in the election process inside Iran.
It's election day in Iran and the result seems a foregone conclusion; however, the meaning of thi... more It's election day in Iran and the result seems a foregone conclusion; however, the meaning of this election lies in its consequences for the future of the Islamic Republic. In this episode, Dr James Barry is joined on the panel by Dr Elham Naeej, Dr Naser Ghobadzadeh and Dr Ali Mozaffari to discuss their interpretations of what is happening. Will there be a Hemmati upset, as some dubious polls are predicting, will this election affect the future of voting in Iran, and has this election been engineered to “save the nezam”?
In the second half of the show, the panel is joined by Nasim Basiri of Oregon State University, who explains the specific difficulties face by women in rural and regional Iran which are often left out of Tehran-centric research, as well as the ongoing problem of gendered violence.
The Iran Election 1400 is a weekly podcast produced for he Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. The Series is hosted by Dr Jame Barry and covers the developments in the election process inside Iran.
It’s one week to Election Day and the first two debates have taken place, with candidates trading... more It’s one week to Election Day and the first two debates have taken place, with candidates trading insults and making extravagant promises. There was also a concerted effort to appeal to ethnic minorities and women, two significant marginalised groups, to win their votes. In this episode, Dr James Barry discusses the viability of this approach with Dr Elham Naeej, Dr Ali Mozaffari and Dr Naser Ghobadzadeh, asking why Azerbaijanis in particularly are the focus of candidates’ attention. Also up for discussion, the Supreme Leader’s attempt to intervene on the candidates’ list, the absence of foreign policy discussions in the debates and the ongoing issue of accountability.
In the second part, special guest Dr Alam Saleh of the Australian National University discusses the politics of ethnicity and sectarianism in Iran, and the use of marginal groups by the state.
The Iran Election 1400 is a weekly podcast produced for the Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. The Series is hosted by Dr Jame Barry and covers the developments in the election process inside Iran.
The election campaign is well and truly under way, with candidates making all kinds of far fetche... more The election campaign is well and truly under way, with candidates making all kinds of far fetched promises. The first campaign documentaries have started screening in an environment of strict censorship. In this episode, Dr James Barry is joined by Dr Elham Naeej and Dr Ali Mozaffari to discuss the campaign documentaries released so far, the rise of the election dark horse, Abdol-Naser Hemmati, and the latest antics of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In the second half of the show, special guest Dr Mahmoud Pargoo discusses the findings of his latest book, Presidential Elections in Iran (co-authored with Prof Shahram Akbarzadeh), describing the secularisation of political discourse in Iran since the Revolution.
The Iran Election 1400 is a weekly podcast produced for he Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. The Series is hosted by Dr Jame Barry and covers the developments in the election process inside Iran.
The deadline for the nomination of candidates for Iran’s Presidential Election in June 18 has end... more The deadline for the nomination of candidates for Iran’s Presidential Election in June 18 has ended, and now the period of vetting by the Guardian Council takes place. In this episode, Dr Elham Naeej and Dr Ali Mozaffari join Dr James Barry to discuss all of the main candidates, including the favourites to get through (Ebrahim Raisi, Ali Larijani), some interesting “maybe” candidates (Rostam Ghasemi, Mohsen Hashemi) and some colourful “no chance” candidates (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saeed Mohammad).
This week’s guest is Dr Ali Fathollah-Nejad, who tackles some of the key questions of this election season, including how the diminished role of the President causes voter apathy, and the causes and trajectory of the decline of the Reformist faction.
Brief and cryptic reports were published in Iranian media August 3 about plans to establish a sec... more Brief and cryptic reports were published in Iranian media August 3 about plans to establish a second branch of the national museum in the basement of the mausoleum of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. The plan may reflect an attempt to set up the scene for a personality cult.
This is my brief take/analysis on the failure of constructing cultural identity by the Islamic Re... more This is my brief take/analysis on the failure of constructing cultural identity by the Islamic Republic, something for which Soleimani stood as an emblem.
This is a new documentary to which I contributed as academic consultant. It presents, for the fir... more This is a new documentary to which I contributed as academic consultant. It presents, for the first time, a range of interviews and artifacts from museums and sites from around the world through striking images.
BBC Persian article about ASPS 2018 in Tbilisi which features our work and two other participants... more BBC Persian article about ASPS 2018 in Tbilisi which features our work and two other participants as representative examples of the conference.
This is a short report that was prepared after the jury process upon the request of the competiti... more This is a short report that was prepared after the jury process upon the request of the competition organiser. It is now published in the Iranian architecture media.
This chapter charts the evolution of an architectural rhetoric of regional authenticity in late t... more This chapter charts the evolution of an architectural rhetoric of regional authenticity in late twentieth-century Iran, over the period 1970 to 1996. It traces this evolution through examination of two significant events within the Iranian architectural profession: the International Congress of Architects, inaugurated on 14 September 1970, by Queen Farah, in the historic city of Isfahan, and a national architecture competition for the Iranian Academies Complex in 1991. The first event saw an exchange of perspectives between local and international architects and theorists, focusing on the theme of the relationship between tradition and modernity. The competition, restricted to Iranian architects, and subsequent to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, evoked considerable interest and debate in local professional and academic circles, couched in terms that were compatible with the new state ideology. Ironically, this ‘Islamic’ discourse closely resembled the previous, internationally informed ‘regionalist’ rhetoric.
The chapter examines the 1970 Congress proceedings and archives of the journal ‘Abadi’ on the five premiated competition submissions, in revealing this underlying continuity related to contextual specificity. The global architectural trends and debates on regionalist authenticity persisted, despite the new anti-Western ideology. In conclusion, it argues for the futility of the regionalist position which, despite its appeal to a local resistance to global hegemonies is easily appropriated by totalitarian political systems, and identifies an Iranian anxiety over identity in the late twentieth century.
This chapter charts the evolution of an architectural rhetoric of regional authenticity in late t... more This chapter charts the evolution of an architectural rhetoric of regional authenticity in late twentieth-century Iran, over the period 1970 to 1996. It traces this evolution through examination of two significant events within the Iranian architectural profession: the International Congress of Architects, inaugurated on 14 September 1970, by Queen Farah, in the historic city of Isfahan, and a national architecture competition for the Iranian Academies Complex in 1991. The first event saw an exchange of perspectives between local and international architects and theorists, focusing on the theme of the relationship between tradition and modernity. The competition, restricted to Iranian architects, and subsequent to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, evoked considerable interest and debate in local professional and academic circles, couched in terms that were compatible with the new state ideology. Ironically, this 'Islamic' discourse closely resembled the previous, internationally informed 'regionalist' rhetoric. The chapter examines the 1970 Congress proceedings and archives of the journal 'Abadi' on the five premiated competition submissions, in revealing this underlying continuity related to contextual specificity. The global architectural trends and debates on regionalist authenticity persisted, despite the new anti-Western ideology. In conclusion, it argues for the futility of the regionalist position which, despite its appeal to a local resistance to global hegemonies is easily appropriated by totalitarian
This chapter examines Iranian heritage activism, focussing on an example of activists' use of mas... more This chapter examines Iranian heritage activism, focussing on an example of activists' use of mass media to bring public focus to heritage as a contested field and persuade authorities to take action. Studies of growing and increasingly vocal heritage activism in Iran are scarce, although occasionally the implications of their ideas are discussed in passing in fields such as politics and international relations.2 This paper reinforces and elaborates on some of the findings of a previous study on the terrain of heritage activism in Iran,3 providing an example of heritage activism's manifestation in mass media. It focuses on the analysis of an open letter to President-elect Seyyed Hassan Rouhani, which was drafted in 2013 by heritage activists and signed by more than 60 heritage NGOs. To complement this examination, I also draw on field interviews (see below) and other contextual information. Considered in its social context and history, I argue that heritage activism is a specific instance of social movements in which the cultural framing of activism and the changing structure of political opportunities largely provided by the state play a decisive part. This is particularly apparent in relation to reframing the perceptions of collective identity and homeland of both the state and the activists. By social movement, I mean " sustained, intentional efforts to foster or retard broad legal and social changes, primarily outside institutional channels endorsed by authorities. " 4 Movements seem to have a number of broad characteristics. First, they involve collectives and a level of organisation.5 Second, they present a challenge to the existing institutional or cultural authority.6 Third, they include actors who claim a shared identity.7 Fourth, there is sustained activism through time,8 meaning they are not one-off events. Fifth, they have a measure of public visibility, which may be expressed through protest and in various media outlets. Sixth, they use space unconventionally.9 Avoiding long theories, collective identity defines individual members of the group as similar to one another and distinct to other groups. In the case of activists, it pertains to their particular interpretation of collective Iranian identity. The contextual information presented here is the result of fieldwork carried out in the second half of 2013, primarily in the capital Tehran, where many active heritage NGOs are located. The City of Shiraz was also selected as a provincial example, particularly due to its proximity to significant pre-Islamic heritage sites such as Persepolis and Pasargadae. The " informants " were chosen from among activists in these regions. The open letter was drafted by Alireza Afshari and consists of a full two-page version together with a brief, one-page executive summary.10 Afshari is a forerunner and prominent activist in the field of heritage, a journalist known in heritage circles for his organisational capacity and as one of the founders of the Afraz society (Iranic Territories Cultural Society). I contextualise the analysis of the letter in relation to my encounters with him and his other texts, mostly available on his blog, khordegiri.11 This letter is a valuable indicator of heritage activism and the existence of a movement because it shows their public agenda. It is a clear attempt to influence the state conception and management of heritage and is signed by a sizeable group of heritage activists. It also demonstrates that activists in Iran, like activists the world over, characteristically utilise the media to gain representation and recognition.12 However, Iranian activists cannot utilise the media in the same way as activists in other countries due to the top-down relationship between the Iranian state and the media. Instead they utilise it as " a key space wherein the debates about the nature of political participation and the contours of the public sphere can be articulated. " 13 Having said this, various media outlets are more or less aligned with different (at times conflicting) state factions. As discussed later, this allows some room for expression of views as was the case in this letter. Personal connections of the author, Afshari, were also a factor in the letter's circulation in the media. Today's heritage activism has to be understood in the context of state-heritage relationships beginning in twentieth century Iran. Because of this, the following section of this chapter is dedicated to providing an overview of that relationship and the making of heritage in that country. Within this context, a close reading of some parts of the open letter help to identify a number of common characteristics of heritage movements in Iran in relation to relevant aspects of social movement theory. An overview of heritage-state relations in Iran My objective is not to dwell on theories of heritage, but rather to examine evidence of heritage activism. I subscribe to Tunbridge and Ashworth's definition of heritage as " a contemporary product shaped from
Public Lecture at the Australian National University, Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS) ... more Public Lecture at the Australian National University, Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS) Majlis Dr Ali Mozaffari
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Books by Ali Mozaffari
This is the translation to Persian of my book Forming National Identity in Iran (I.B. Tauris 2014).
The premise of the book is that development has been a globalizing project that originated in the West. Transposed into other contexts, this project instigates a renewed historical consciousness and imagination of the past. The authors explore the rise of this consciousness in architecture, examining the theoretical context to the debates, international exchanges made in architectural congresses in the 1970s, the use of housing as the vehicle for everyday heritage, and forms of symbolic public architecture that reflect monumental time.
REVIEWS
“This book significantly contributes to our understanding of the complexities of heritage in Asia. It broadens our horizons to look at issues of governance, state-society relations, and the institutional ways memory and material culture are politically negotiated. It reveals heritage as a series of movements, unpacking, elaborating and critiquing what that term means in different social settings. An exciting contribution to the examination of heritage in Asia.” • Tim Winter, University of Western Australia, Professor of Critical Heritage studies, Author of Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century
“The book is a wake-up call for heritage practitioners who still too easily think of the material past as a static and unmediated record of times past. Heritage Movements in Asia reminds us that the heritage expert is only one among numerous players competing to inscribe meaning on the traces of the past embedded in the ground we all live on. As this book vividly illustrates, heritage activism, whether in the form of mass mobilisation or more intimate engagements, is what gives the material past its dynamism.” • Denis Byrne, Author of Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia
“Looking at heritage processes through the lens of social movements, this volume adds a meaningful contribution to the growing literature of critical heritage studies.” • Neel Kamal Chapagain, Director of the Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University
This edited volume presents for the first time a broad, multi-disciplinary examination of Pasargadae by experts from both outside and within Iran. It specifically focuses on those disciplines that are absent from existing studies, such as ethnography, tourism and museum studies providing valuable insights into this fascinating place. In conclusion, the book argues that to understand World Heritage sites and their problems fully, a holistic approach should be adopted, which considers the manifold of perspectives and issues and it puts forward a novel approach to the question of heritage, representation and construction of collective identity from the framework of place.
Book Chapters by Ali Mozaffari
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This collection of essays reappraises the contributions made by modernist movements from regions generally regarded as peripheral or semi-peripheral to a global aesthetic of Modernism. It particularly focuses on European semi-peripheries, combining theoretical chapters and individual case studies to examine the cultural and aesthetic complexities of so-called peripheral modernisms. Contributing to research on the ‘transnational turn’ in New Modernist Studies, the volume takes recent scholarship on postcolonial modernisms one step further by exploring a broader geopolitical expanse than the (formerly) colonised regions under global capitalism. It highlights the local and translocal specificities of modernist movements from regions such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean to offer new insights into the concept of global modernism.
Citation:
Mozaffari, Ali, and Nigel Westbrook. 2017. “Reclaiming Heritage Through the Image of Traditional Habitat.” In The Making of Islamic Heritage: Muslim Pasts and Heritage Presents, edited by Trinidad Rico, 47–65. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
This is the translation to Persian of my book Forming National Identity in Iran (I.B. Tauris 2014).
The premise of the book is that development has been a globalizing project that originated in the West. Transposed into other contexts, this project instigates a renewed historical consciousness and imagination of the past. The authors explore the rise of this consciousness in architecture, examining the theoretical context to the debates, international exchanges made in architectural congresses in the 1970s, the use of housing as the vehicle for everyday heritage, and forms of symbolic public architecture that reflect monumental time.
REVIEWS
“This book significantly contributes to our understanding of the complexities of heritage in Asia. It broadens our horizons to look at issues of governance, state-society relations, and the institutional ways memory and material culture are politically negotiated. It reveals heritage as a series of movements, unpacking, elaborating and critiquing what that term means in different social settings. An exciting contribution to the examination of heritage in Asia.” • Tim Winter, University of Western Australia, Professor of Critical Heritage studies, Author of Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century
“The book is a wake-up call for heritage practitioners who still too easily think of the material past as a static and unmediated record of times past. Heritage Movements in Asia reminds us that the heritage expert is only one among numerous players competing to inscribe meaning on the traces of the past embedded in the ground we all live on. As this book vividly illustrates, heritage activism, whether in the form of mass mobilisation or more intimate engagements, is what gives the material past its dynamism.” • Denis Byrne, Author of Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia
“Looking at heritage processes through the lens of social movements, this volume adds a meaningful contribution to the growing literature of critical heritage studies.” • Neel Kamal Chapagain, Director of the Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University
This edited volume presents for the first time a broad, multi-disciplinary examination of Pasargadae by experts from both outside and within Iran. It specifically focuses on those disciplines that are absent from existing studies, such as ethnography, tourism and museum studies providing valuable insights into this fascinating place. In conclusion, the book argues that to understand World Heritage sites and their problems fully, a holistic approach should be adopted, which considers the manifold of perspectives and issues and it puts forward a novel approach to the question of heritage, representation and construction of collective identity from the framework of place.
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This collection of essays reappraises the contributions made by modernist movements from regions generally regarded as peripheral or semi-peripheral to a global aesthetic of Modernism. It particularly focuses on European semi-peripheries, combining theoretical chapters and individual case studies to examine the cultural and aesthetic complexities of so-called peripheral modernisms. Contributing to research on the ‘transnational turn’ in New Modernist Studies, the volume takes recent scholarship on postcolonial modernisms one step further by exploring a broader geopolitical expanse than the (formerly) colonised regions under global capitalism. It highlights the local and translocal specificities of modernist movements from regions such as Eastern and Central Europe and the Mediterranean to offer new insights into the concept of global modernism.
Citation:
Mozaffari, Ali, and Nigel Westbrook. 2017. “Reclaiming Heritage Through the Image of Traditional Habitat.” In The Making of Islamic Heritage: Muslim Pasts and Heritage Presents, edited by Trinidad Rico, 47–65. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
Keywords: Ferdowsi, Seyhoun, Iranian architecture, cultural landscape
documentary films with a specific focus on the documentary film
Taq Kasra Wonder of Architecture (Akbarzadeh 2018), which tells
the story of the pre-Islamic Persian/Iranian historical site of Taq
Kasra (the Arch of Ctesiphon), presently located in Iraq. The paper
situates the film within a broader context of documentaries about
Persian edifices in the region and draws on primary interview
material with the documentary maker Pejman Akbarzadeh.
Through its analyses, the paper shows how, especially in the
Iranian setting, a documentary film can engage and (re)produce
heritage, and how, when compared to that setting, Taq Kasra
exposes persistent aspects of cultural politics within the Islamic
Republic since its establishment after the Islamic Revolution of
1979 and Saddam Hussein’s policies. In doing so, it is argued that
the film provides a mode of critical enquiry into heritage in
current historical and political circumstances in Iran. The paper
addresses a lacuna in both critical heritage and film studies,
namely, the analysis and interpretation of the making of heritage
in film and as film.
research, analysis of the specific circumstances and dilemmas that
individuals and groups face when pursuing heritage goals and
partaking in heritage contests can benefit from further
methodological work. This paper presents a case and method for
incorporating concepts from an emerging interactionist
perspective on social movements into heritage research in order
to better conceptualize and analyze the interactions and
processes through which collective identity and heritage is coproduced.
We examine the political and interpretive processes at
the heart of heritage research, consider areas in which the
language and concepts of social movements addresses existing
gaps and disagreements, and identify a set of questions that will
open new perspectives on heritage movements and contests. We
apply these questions to a heritage contest over the World
Heritage site of Pasargadae in Iran, emphasizing how heritage
activists advanced their perspectives and claims, eventually
leading to the incorporation of Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage within
the official Islamic republic discourse.
Here is the bibliographic detail: Mozaffari, Ali. 2015. "Ehraz HoviyyatL Barrasi Jonbeshhaye Miras-e Tarikhi dar Rasanehaye Omoomi." Goft-o-Goo Summer (67):83-103.
A transient morphology of the city is therefore constructed through the interaction of three forces: religious festival, the spaces and paths that relate to this festival, and the imaginative recovery as means of keeping tradition alive. In this paper, I will first clarify a notion of morphology of the event and then after elaborating on Ashura and examining the scholarship on Islamic cities, will explicate a notion of tradition as a context for such acts of recovery, then elaborate within the context of the above three forces the importance of spaces of festival which will make eloquent the importance of the intangible morphology in a traditional city.
Event curated by Ali Mozaffari
Workshop co-conveners: Ali Mozaffari and David Harvey
Film directed by Pejman Akbarzadeh
Deadline for abstracts submission: 1 November 2015
Conference: Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference 2016
Location and date: Montreal, Canada, 6-10 June 2016
Session Title:
Activism, Civil Society and Heritage
Session type:
Regular paper session, open
Description:
Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. Since the late 1980s, the phenomenon of contestation in heritage has been increasingly recognised. However, there is still little detailed and situated knowledge about the range of actors present in contestations, the variety of strategies they pursue, the reasoning behind their choices, the networks they develop, and how from all this, heritage has been and is constructed. More often than not, contestation appears to be essentialised as occurring between the ‘state’ (often treated as a monolith) and the people or the community (such as certain uses of the idea of Authorised Heritage Discourse in Uses of Heritage). Following this trend, much of the growing body of scholarship on heritage has tended to assume universalising theoretical positions based on limited, specific contexts, thus somewhat compromising the ability to draw nuanced and theoretical positions that take into account the diversity of contexts within which heritage is produced.
This panel acknowledges the emerging trends in heritage studies which take into account what may be described as relational aspects of heritage construction, such as those inspired by Deleuze, which examine heritage in terms of assemblages (Harrison 2013), Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (Krauss 2008), or other approaches that are increasingly considering heritage as part of human, material and social flows. The premise of this panel is that heritage is constructed, contested, and negotiated through actions of players or actors and within traceable places and spaces (arenas) through the course of time. Of interest here are the mechanisms of heritage construction and contestation as well as the conceptual and theoretical perspectives that may drive interpretation of realities on the ground.
The panel is open to scholars from any field of enquiry. We invite contributors to focus on different aspects of heritage in diverse areas to examine questions including but not limited to the following:
• Activism is not limited to individuals. A player in heritage may be an individual, a compound player such as an NGO, or even a state entity such as a heritage organisation with divergent internal perspectives. Who is a heritage activist? How do activists identify themselves?
• How does the material turn in social sciences, with its recognition of the role of non-human actors and distributed agency, transform our understanding of contentious heritage?
• What is the micro-politics of heritage in social movements including preservationist movements?
• What is the relationship between heritage and individual or collective activism?
• How does activism change heritage and how does heritage change activism?
• How does engagement with media transform heritage? What are the preferred modes of communication and media for heritage and why? What does the preference tell us about the relationship between civil society, public sphere and heritage?
• How and why is heritage transformed into a cause?
• How does advocacy for heritage manifest itself?
• Where does contestation take place? And why?
• What is the role of space and place in forms of contesting heritage? Does contestation lead to new definitions and experiences of place and space? At what scales?
• Other questions that may explore the relationship between agency, materiality, affect and heritage will also be considered.
Conveners:
Dr Ali Mozaffari, Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University (email: a.mozaffari@curtin.edu.au)
Ali Mozaffari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the founding co-editor of Berghahn series Explorations in Heritage Studies. His publications include:
• Mozaffari, A. 2014. Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place. London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.
• Mozaffari, A. ed. 2014. World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae. London, UK: Ashgate.
• Mozaffari, Ali. 2015. “The Heritage ‘NGO’: A Case Study on the Role of Grass Roots Heritage Societies in Iran and Their Perception of Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (9). doi:10.1080/13527258.2015.1028961.
Dr Tod Jones, Department of Geography and Planning, School of Built Environment, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University (email:t.jones@curtin.edu.au)
Tod Jones is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography. His publications include:
• Jones, T. S. 2013. Culture, Power and Authoritarianism in the Indonesian State. Cultural Policy Across the Twentieth Century to the Reform Era. Netherlands: Brill.
• Jones, T. S., and M. Talebian. 2014. “Perspectives and Prospects for Cultural Tourism in the Pasargadae Religion.” In World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae, ed. Ali Mozaffari, 155-172. England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
• Jones, T. S., and C. L. Birdsall Jones. 2014. “Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions.”International Journal of Cultural Policy 20 (3): 296-317.
Deadline for abstracts submission: 1 November 2015
Conference: Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference 2016
Location and date: Montreal, Canada, 6-10 June 2016
Session title
Heritage and Liminality: cross-cultural and inter disciplinary perspectives on liminality and cultural heritage
Session Type
Regular papers, open
Session Description
Heritage has multiple, concurrent origins. It is performed and produced by individuals, groups and organisations, or institutions on various scales. It is a transformative process and thus closely connected to the transitional. In heritage transitionality may be usefully conceptualised under the rubric of the liminal, which at its core anticipates change and transformation, structure-agency relationships, affect, and human experience – all significant issues in recent theoretical debates in the field.
Various individuals, groups, institutions and even countries can create, attempt to control or contest liminality. Examining heritage in light of liminality can pertain to interrogating notions of transition, boundary and border zones and their manifestations and constructions as well as the actors who construct them and their possible intentions in both quotidian and exceptional times. Additionally, new insights may be drawn about understanding spatial and temporal transitions between heritage sites and landscapes and spaces of everyday life or the structure of experiencing a heritage place. In coupling liminality and heritage, the panel ultimately pursues a two-fold objective: to develop a better or different understanding of heritage through the use of liminality, and to explore the potential contribution of heritage to understandings of liminality in the present.
Authors are invited to analyse the relationship between heritage and liminality in their multiple forms. The panel cuts through a number of conference themes and welcomes papers from multiple disciplines including geography, architecture, anthropology, sociology, tourism studies and politics. Both theoretical and case-based studies with theoretical implications will be considered.
Possible topics of investigation include but are not limited to the following interrelated aspects:
1. Time and temporality – how thresholds and liminal zones change over time and how is the transition experienced by various groups and/or individuals?
1.1. What are the temporal qualities of thresholds in relation to places?
1.2. What are the temporal differences between liminal zones and their immediate surroundings?
1.3. How, when and by whom are they constructed as thresholds?
1.4. How do thresholds and transitions transform in time and what are the causes for their transformation?
1.5. How is the question of time related to other tangible or intangible aspects of experiencing heritage?
2. Narrative
2.1. What are the narratives of entering/transitioning for various groups of people?
2.2. How are experiences narrated on a quotidian basis and how does that narrative differ in other times?
2.3. At a more local scale, what are the various narratives of entering, border zones and thresholds and how do they interact?
2.4. Performance
2.5. How, when and why are transitions performed?
2.6. What kind of performances and actions create, keep or dissolve a liminal state at various scales: in relation to a locale (as in entering and exiting) or in set of intangible institutional structures that operate at multiple scales?
3. Place
3.1. How is liminality created, controlled or contested in place?
3.2. Who are the actors (individuals, collectives or institutions) who create or resist liminality?
4. Embodiment and concretization
4.1. What are the symbolic (visual, structural and other forms) markers of such zones?
4.2. How do they appear and how are they constructed in their settings (urban, architectural, landscape)?
4.3. How does historical transformation of the setting influence the construction of a liminal zone and vice versa?
A selection of papers will be considered for inclusion in an academic publication.
Session Conveners
• Dr Ali Mozaffari, Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute, Curtin University
Ali Mozaffari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the founding co-editor of Berghahn series: Explorations in Heritage Studies. His publications include:
Mozaffari, A. 2014. Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place. London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.
Mozaffari, A. ed. 2014. World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae. London, Uk: Ashgate.
Mozaffari, Ali. 2015. “The Heritage ‘NGO’: A Case Study on the Role of Grass Roots Heritage Societies in Iran and Their Perception of Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (9). Doi:10.1080/13527258.2015.1028961.
Associate Professor Nigel Westbrook, School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, University of Western Australia
Associate Professor Westbrook is Associate Dean of Research at the School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts. His latest publications include:
Westbrook, N.B. 2014, 'The palace hall of Chrysotriklinos as an example of emulation and contestation in the early Byzantine period.', Third EAHN International Meeting, Torino, Italy, 1, pp. 666-682.
Westbrook, N.B. 2014, 'The regionalist debate in the context of the 1970s architectural forums in Iran', Translation, Auckland, New Zealand, 31, pp. 385-400.
Contact Details
Please and contact Dr Ali Mozaffari (email: a.mozaffari@curtin.edu.au) is in the first instance. All proposals should be submitted to the conference website for adjudication.
Series Editors:
Ali Mozaffari, Curtin University (a.mozaffari@curtin.edu.au)
David Harvey, University of Exeter (d.c.harvey@exeter.ac.uk)
Editorial Board:
Erik Champion, Curtin University
Mads Daugbjerg, Aarhus University
Elisa Giaccardi, Technical University of Delft
Rodney Harrison, University College London
Simon Knell, University of Leicester
Daniel Laven, Mid Sweden University
Iain Robertson, University of Gloucestershire
Gunhild Setten, Norwegian University of Science & Technology
Marie Luise Stig Sorensen, Cambridge University
James Taylor, Imperial War Museum
Heather Viles, University of Oxford
Andrea Witcomb, Deakin University
Submissions
Formal submissions should be sent directly to Berghahn Books (EditorialUS@berghahnbooks.com).
This collection of essays is the first to examine contemporary heritage movements in Asia. The volume draws on concepts of Social Movements Theory as well as recent fieldwork to present fresh research and new perspectives on heritage and activism in various parts of the Asian continent. Heritage movements are responses by public and privately constituted groups to some of the global challenges of late modernity including nationalism, pluralism, state-society relations and the influence of a growing middle class. Much of the growing body of scholarship on heritage is concerned either with specific contexts or with broader historical and theoretical issues at the expense of contextual specificities. The book adds a new dimension to existing scholarship in the field of heritage by embracing a broader idea of Asia which includes south and central Asia and therefore the hitherto absent Muslim context. It thus contains countries such as Iran and Afghanistan as well as Indonesia. Additionally, focussing on emerging heritage movements in various contexts, the volume in its totality explores and articulates the applicability Social Movements Theory to this new context – an aspect that has hitherto received little attention. In conclusion the book reveals the subtleties and differences in current heritage movements and the emergent identities and social challenges in their host societies, while highlighting the shared underlying processes with regard to their engagement with and use of heritage.
The Persian paper is accessible here: https://www.bbc.com/persian/articles/crg9yxky8wgo
In this episode, Dr James Barry summarises the election campaign, looking at how the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 caused a crisis for the government, and the ways in which Raisi’s rivals were removed in the lead-up to the election over the past two months. In the second half, Dr Barry is joined on the panel by Dr Ali Mozaffari to discuss what sort of leader Raisi will be, what the participation rate tells us about public attitudes to voting in Iran, and what this election means in a larger political and historical context.
The Iran Election 1400 is a weekly podcast produced for he Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University.
The Series is hosted by Dr Jame Barry and covers the developments in the election process inside Iran.
In the second half of the show, the panel is joined by Nasim Basiri of Oregon State University, who explains the specific difficulties face by women in rural and regional Iran which are often left out of Tehran-centric research, as well as the ongoing problem of gendered violence.
The Iran Election 1400 is a weekly podcast produced for he Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University.
The Series is hosted by Dr Jame Barry and covers the developments in the election process inside Iran.
In the second part, special guest Dr Alam Saleh of the Australian National University discusses the politics of ethnicity and sectarianism in Iran, and the use of marginal groups by the state.
The Iran Election 1400 is a weekly podcast produced for the Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University.
The Series is hosted by Dr Jame Barry and covers the developments in the election process inside Iran.
In the second half of the show, special guest Dr Mahmoud Pargoo discusses the findings of his latest book, Presidential Elections in Iran (co-authored with Prof Shahram Akbarzadeh), describing the secularisation of political discourse in Iran since the Revolution.
The Iran Election 1400 is a weekly podcast produced for he Middle East Studies Forum at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University.
The Series is hosted by Dr Jame Barry and covers the developments in the election process inside Iran.
This week’s guest is Dr Ali Fathollah-Nejad, who tackles some of the key questions of this election season, including how the diminished role of the President causes voter apathy, and the causes and trajectory of the decline of the Reformist faction.
Now on ABC website found here: https://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2014/03/18/3966332.htm
The chapter examines the 1970 Congress proceedings and archives of the journal ‘Abadi’ on the five premiated competition submissions, in revealing this underlying continuity related to contextual specificity. The global architectural trends and debates on regionalist authenticity persisted, despite the new anti-Western ideology. In conclusion, it argues for the futility of the regionalist position which, despite its appeal to a local resistance to global hegemonies is easily appropriated by totalitarian political systems, and identifies an Iranian anxiety over identity in the late twentieth century.