Firoozeh Farvardin

Anti-gender politics and anti-feminist sentiments, which feature discriminatory, misogynist, homo and transphobic, and exclusionary discourses and practices, have been increasingly on the move globally, but so have feminist movements and discourses on structural transformation beyond gender equality mainly originating in the so-called Global South, but not limited to it.
From the recent feminist revolutions in Rojava and Iran to mass mobilizations of millions of women and gender dissidents in Latin America against gender violence and also the International Women's strike across the globe, feminisms are on the move and moving the societies.
The course is designed to collectively discuss approaches and theories on the emergence and conditions of possibilities of these new feminisms and assess their impacts on each other and on mobility and mobilization in societies where they originated or migrated. The seminar aims to broaden students' knowledge of various lineages of feminisms, new social movements, everyday life politics, and gender (counter-) strategies and esthetics by discussing various cases of the unfolding new feminisms in different territories in the past decade. Thus, the course will serve as an entry point to shift the focus from dominant narratives of feminisms to a more inclusive, transversal, and transnational approach. The seminar will benefit occasionally from the participation and contributions of activists and scholars.

This research-oriented bilingual (English and Farsi) seminar aims to deal with the production and consumption of space by migrants and particularly by refugees in a city namely Berlin. Migration changes a city and its spatiotemporality. Acknowledging migration in a city and consider it as a city of migration, introduces political, cultural and spatial crises. Migration is no longer a deviation in the norm. Rather, migrants and particularly refugees are a more representative of the current society. They engage and contribute to the future of the city through their interactions and imaginaries. Thus, of particular interest in this course is heterotopias, i.e. the spaces of otherness in the city. These spaces are decisive elements that form spatial imaginaries and guide social actors (here refugees) in their everyday life.

The course also addresses the temporal indications of living as “the other” (i.e. refugee) in a particular space and ways in which spatial experiences can sway temporal horizons of social actors. This invites consideration of the expectations of social actors and changes in them regarding their lived experiences.

Students and refugees in this course will learn about city, urbanisation, space, migration and  otherness in order to explore the urban spaces in Berlin. This seminar is in line with the previous seminar (Spaces of Migration) to produce spatial narratives of refugees in Berlin. It will benefit from the previous attendance with refugee background as the facilitator of research in the seminar. The spatial narratives of refugees will be presented on a specific website that is designed for the project.

The seminar is organized by the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration research and funded by Kultur,- Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät as a part of Humboldt University’s initiative to opening the university for refugees.


Keywords: Migration, Post-migrant society, Otherness, Heterotopia, Social spaces, Social imaginaries, Spatial memory

This research-oriented bilingual (English and Farsi) discusses transnational migration imaginaries that shape the expectations and affect the calculations of social actors. The spatial focus of this seminar is the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as the main hub of the migration in the world. During the seminar different causes of migration and displacement, e.g. war, climate change, colonialism, unemployment, and so forth will be discussed under three main umbrellas: cultural, political and economic themes.  As these topics are not limited to national borders, only a multi-scalar approach to migration can account for the complexity of the situation.

In recent years, the Middle East and North Africa span both poles of migration: as countries of migrant destination, and as countries of migrant origin. According to the UNHCR’s report, just in 2015, this region accounted for more than 30 percent of global displacement, including 2.7 million refugees, 13.9 million internally displaced people and an estimated 374,200 stateless individuals. Hence, one can witness the emerge of a new transnational space in the region, between the countries of origin such as Syria and Afghanistan, transit countries such as Iran, Turkey, and Jordan as well as the desired destinies of the EU countries in general and Germany in particular.

The world is too complex to be considered and calculated by social actors in the real time. Imaginaries are ways in which the complexity of the world is reduced to go on. In the case of migration, although the territorial national state still the main unit of politics all around the world, avoiding any trap of ‘methodological nationalism’ urge us to adopt a transnational analytical framework to provide an account of extraterritorial migration imaginaries.  Migration studies, which constraints its research question and empirical data collection with the countries of origin or with the countries of desired settlement fails to capture the complex dynamics of migration, which is ‘embedded in a multi-level transnational field’.

Students and refugees in this course will learn about the history of MENA, colonialism, Migration Imaginaries, to produce a rich context for migration narratives. This seminar is in line with the previous seminar (Spaces of Migration) that produce spatial narratives of refugees in Berlin. It will benefit from the previous attendance with refugee background as the facilitator of research in the seminar.



This bilingual seminar is organized as a part of the seminar series “Berlin in Dialogue” for refugee, German, and international students by the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration research. The seminars have been granted the prize “Menschen mit Hintergrund” by the university of Regensburg and the BAMF in December 2016.

After two decades of very successful and effective family planning program, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran urged the government to impose family-oriented and pronatalist policies. Concurrently, a new comprehensive economic plan, i.e., the resistance
economy program, was introduced, primarily aimed to recover Iran’s economy from the effects of harsh international sanctions against the Islamic Republic. In this context, The Birth of Neoliberal Family Politics: A History of Governmentalization of the State in Iran, contributes to conceiving political rationality behind state policies in the current conjuncture.
The main question that the thesis addresses is: why and how the family became the strategic object/subject of political struggles in contemporary Iran. In this context, the thesis attempts to reveal the strategic importance of policing the family, i.e., family politics, for the stability and continuity of the Islamic Republic.

This paper seeks to discuss a variety of theoretical and historical evidence to find a conceptual and methodological answer to the present moment's question of family transformation and its interrelations with politics (mainly state power) in the postcolonial context of the Middle East (ME). Family here is considered not in its Western-dominated nuclear form but in its broader definition, i.e. a specific site of power relations that mainly based on reproduction (socially and biologically) and kinship network. Achieving its goal, that is developing a new framework for studying family/politics interrelation, this research on the one side, reads critically the current intellectual debates on family and politics relations in social sciences; on the other side, it discusses historical facts and political evidence on family transformations in modern ME. Tracing family/politics relation in the western intellectual history, it eventually leads to the concept of boundaries, i.e. all institutionalized and/or imaginary social fields of actions that, by simultaneously segregating/integrating, excluding/including, serve to (re-)construct the "space of family" and the rest of society. The paper, based on historical facts, suggests that in order to decolonize the family studies in the ME, not only researchers should consider the colonial state projects as one of the main entry points, but also they should study the histories of the fluid and dislocated boundaries of the state and family. Furthermore, this paper discusses the historical instances of the flues of boundary shaping discourses between the ME and western societies in order to advance a new conceptual framework.

In December 2017, in the Revolution Street of Tehran, back then an unknown feminist activist, stood on the utility box, tied her headscarf to a stick, and waved it to the crowd. In less than a month, in other streets and cities, women and men did the same anti-compulsory hijāb performance. Coincided with the uprising against the government, the images of the unveiled woman went viral. Consequently, the "Daughters of the Revolution," as a non-movement was born and became the symbol of the anti-government uprising, while they had apparent distinguished roots and demands. This momentum opened new directions for political activism and drastically affected the discourse of the feminist movement in Iran. What makes a simple (un)veiling performance such strong and significant for the feminist movement and political protests? In this presentation, I delve further into this question through retracing and unveiling the less visible narratives of women protests in Iran. For more than a century, women in Iran have struggled to raise their voices in public, resist patriarchy, religious fanaticism, and domestic violence. Confronting the Iranian state's discriminatory policies, women have demanded their rights, albeit with various strategies, due to their differences in the perspectives, political projects, and approaches in addressing gender inequality and women's conditions. This very encapsulated and inevitably uncomprehensive narrative aims to contribute to a subjective history of contemporary women's struggles by putting the female body and its performance at the heart of the political contestations.

Th is article aims to analyze the transformations of reproductive politics in the Islamic Republic and to explore how the state's policies and reproductive practices of women in the family became an important site of governing in Iran. By tracing transformations of reproductive politics, I off er a diff erent periodization of postrevo-lutionary Iran refl ected in diff erent socioeconomic imaginaries, that is, main sources of meaning making for people to justify certain individual or collective actions. Based on archival research and a secondary analysis of existing inquiries, I distinguish three phases in politics of reproduction in the Islamic Republic: optimism and hope, development , and resistance and survival. I also elaborate on how women in each period, as noncollective agents, have (re)acted collectively in their everyday practices to those reproductive policies. Based on my fi ndings, I argue that one can understand the current conjuncture, which corresponds with adopting neopronatalist and family-oriented reproductive policies, through a new shift in the Islamic Republic's governing regime: a neoliberal turn to manage the socioeconomic crisis aft er 2006. Th is study shows that neopronatalism not only carries a major burden of social reproduction and regulation of sexuality but also performs crucial functions in advancing neoliberalization. Moreover, neopronatalism, unlike pronatalism in the fi rst decade of the Islamic Republic, primarily targets the quality rather than the quantity of the population and families. From a socioeconomic perspective, I conclude that the recent shift in reproductive politics eventually pushes more women back into domestic or caregiving work, defeminizing the labor market while reinforcing the informal sector and domestic work units, which are mainly female based.