Lana Askari is currently Research Fellow at the Netherlands Scientific Council for Policy Advise and Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she worked for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in public policy consultancy. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media at the University of Manchester. After finishing her BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences (University College Utrecht), she was trained in anthropology (MPhil Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge) and documentary filmmaking (MA Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester). She conducted fieldwork in Sulaimani, Iraqi Kurdistan where she was a research affiliate at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. Her research areas include visual anthropology, ethnographic documentary film, diaspora and migration, and the anthropology of time, planning, hope and future. Supervisors: Andrew Irving and Michelle Obeid Address: Department of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester
Arthur Lewis Building, 2nd Floor
M13 9PL Manchester UK
This article discusses how the ongoing conflict in Syria and the Rojava Revolution gave way to ne... more This article discusses how the ongoing conflict in Syria and the Rojava Revolution gave way to newly imagined futures and political possibilities for displaced Kurdish Syrians. It examines the Syrian war and the broader Middle Eastern context as a system of unpredictable escalations (Højer et al. 2018) and the liberation of Kobanî as a “critical” and “generative” moment (Das 1995; Kapferer 2015) in the Kurdish imaginary. Using ethnographic (audiovisual) material, I point to how people in forced displacement must constantly navigate uncertainty and reconfigure and consolidate their unknown future paths. I argue that my interlocutor Mihemed stabilized these uncertainties through his capacity to hold multiple future possibilities open simultaneously in order to keep every outcome viable.
This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how the... more This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how they imagine and (re) negotiate their future, through the discussion of my documentary film, Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing, which tells the story of my parents’ return to Iraqi Kurdistan after living in the Netherlands for more than 20 years. While over the past decade, the Kurdistan Region has developed into a safe-haven situated within a conflict-laden area, the recent tension around the Islamic State’s (IS) expansion has changed the social and political landscape significantly in the Middle East, leading to new considerations for potential returnees. Based on the fieldwork I conducted through filming my own family during their return journey, I argue that using visual anthropological tools can open a window onto diasporic movements and illuminate social life in times of crisis by challenging the representation of Kurdish migrants and addressing the impact of uncertainty in their...
This paper will discuss the Haqqa movement, a Sufi heterodoxy turned towards socio-political issu... more This paper will discuss the Haqqa movement, a Sufi heterodoxy turned towards socio-political issues in the rural areas of Iraqi Kurdistan, providing an example of social movement in the region’s peasant and nationalist struggles. This article is part of a wider publication on religious minorities in Iraqi Kurdistan. While including other writings on this particular history, this paper is mainly based on filmed interviews with the Haqqa community, and visits to different sites of Kalkasmaq and Shadala. I argue that the religious-political character of the sheikhs and Haqqa, which saw its height around the early and mid-twentieth century, the decline of followers in the past decades, the push back into mainstream Islam, and the movement’s split provide another example of power struggles in Iraqi Kurdistan. Thus, rather than treating the Haqqa as merely an anomaly within the religious and political landscape in Iraqi Kurdistan (but perhaps indeed as an undervalued part of Kurdish history), it is very much part of existing socio-political structures and cannot be excluded from geopolitical developments of the past century.
This paper will consider the visual and theoretical approaches to exploring how people in Iraqi K... more This paper will consider the visual and theoretical approaches to exploring how people in Iraqi Kurdistan re-negotiate their future plans in times of crisis through discussing the ethnographic documentary film Bridge to Kobane (2016).
This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how the... more This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how they imagine and (re) negotiate their future, through the discussion of my documentary film, Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing, which tells the story of my parents’ return to Iraqi Kurdistan after living in the Netherlands for more than 20 years. While over the past decade, the Kurdistan Region has developed into a safe- haven situated within a conflict-laden area, the recent tension around the Islamic State’s (IS) expansion has changed the social and political landscape significantly in the Middle East, leading to new considerations for potential returnees. Based on the fieldwork I conducted through filming my own family during their return journey, I argue that using visual anthropological tools can open a window onto diasporic movements and illuminate social life in times of crisis by challenging the representation of Kurdish migrants and addressing the impact of uncertainty in their lives.
This panel seeks to explore workers' resistance by discussing how audiovisual representations com... more This panel seeks to explore workers' resistance by discussing how audiovisual representations communicate their precarious experiences. How can we understand, analyse and support workers' resistance through audiovisual methods? We welcome current and past reflections on worker's rights and resistances, encouraging feminist and political ecological approaches.
How can we understand, analyse and support workers' resistance through audiovisual methods? This panel seeks abstracts that explore the marginalized actors within labour structures, as the active agents of localized intersubjective knowledge, rather than mere resources of a capitalist commodity chain (Haraway, 1988). In the past century worker's rights have been advanced through popular (collective) resistance. However, workers' precarity remains a current issue affected by neoliberal policies and recent COVID-19 regulations as seen in continuing global protests, from factory workers to white collar flex jobs. We are interested in the construction of these resistances through 'sonic images'; "the set of postures, body movements, expressions, gestures" that expose the workers' social and political context through their affective relations, modes of performance and everyday forms of survival (D'Amico, 2015:2). These include localized audiovisual production among workers, which serve to disrupt "comfortable [visual] boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules" (Mitchell 1992: 223), create empathy in shared feelings of social immobility and entrapment, or other acts of resistance or forms collective or collaborative activism. The focus on audiovisual representation questions how existing forms of visualization of localised labour build a ubiquitous form of knowledge across the chain. It aims to draw attention to how the visualization of embodied forms of labour experience can help us understand the social issues and environmental sustainability within different industries. We encourage feminist and political ecological approaches that consider workers as active members of their environments who work to reshape dominant economic and gender norms that shape such environment.
This article discusses how the ongoing conflict in Syria and the Rojava Revolution gave way to ne... more This article discusses how the ongoing conflict in Syria and the Rojava Revolution gave way to newly imagined futures and political possibilities for displaced Kurdish Syrians. It examines the Syrian war and the broader Middle Eastern context as a system of unpredictable escalations (Højer et al. 2018) and the liberation of Kobanî as a “critical” and “generative” moment (Das 1995; Kapferer 2015) in the Kurdish imaginary. Using ethnographic (audiovisual) material, I point to how people in forced displacement must constantly navigate uncertainty and reconfigure and consolidate their unknown future paths. I argue that my interlocutor Mihemed stabilized these uncertainties through his capacity to hold multiple future possibilities open simultaneously in order to keep every outcome viable.
This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how the... more This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how they imagine and (re) negotiate their future, through the discussion of my documentary film, Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing, which tells the story of my parents’ return to Iraqi Kurdistan after living in the Netherlands for more than 20 years. While over the past decade, the Kurdistan Region has developed into a safe-haven situated within a conflict-laden area, the recent tension around the Islamic State’s (IS) expansion has changed the social and political landscape significantly in the Middle East, leading to new considerations for potential returnees. Based on the fieldwork I conducted through filming my own family during their return journey, I argue that using visual anthropological tools can open a window onto diasporic movements and illuminate social life in times of crisis by challenging the representation of Kurdish migrants and addressing the impact of uncertainty in their...
This paper will discuss the Haqqa movement, a Sufi heterodoxy turned towards socio-political issu... more This paper will discuss the Haqqa movement, a Sufi heterodoxy turned towards socio-political issues in the rural areas of Iraqi Kurdistan, providing an example of social movement in the region’s peasant and nationalist struggles. This article is part of a wider publication on religious minorities in Iraqi Kurdistan. While including other writings on this particular history, this paper is mainly based on filmed interviews with the Haqqa community, and visits to different sites of Kalkasmaq and Shadala. I argue that the religious-political character of the sheikhs and Haqqa, which saw its height around the early and mid-twentieth century, the decline of followers in the past decades, the push back into mainstream Islam, and the movement’s split provide another example of power struggles in Iraqi Kurdistan. Thus, rather than treating the Haqqa as merely an anomaly within the religious and political landscape in Iraqi Kurdistan (but perhaps indeed as an undervalued part of Kurdish history), it is very much part of existing socio-political structures and cannot be excluded from geopolitical developments of the past century.
This paper will consider the visual and theoretical approaches to exploring how people in Iraqi K... more This paper will consider the visual and theoretical approaches to exploring how people in Iraqi Kurdistan re-negotiate their future plans in times of crisis through discussing the ethnographic documentary film Bridge to Kobane (2016).
This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how the... more This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how they imagine and (re) negotiate their future, through the discussion of my documentary film, Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing, which tells the story of my parents’ return to Iraqi Kurdistan after living in the Netherlands for more than 20 years. While over the past decade, the Kurdistan Region has developed into a safe- haven situated within a conflict-laden area, the recent tension around the Islamic State’s (IS) expansion has changed the social and political landscape significantly in the Middle East, leading to new considerations for potential returnees. Based on the fieldwork I conducted through filming my own family during their return journey, I argue that using visual anthropological tools can open a window onto diasporic movements and illuminate social life in times of crisis by challenging the representation of Kurdish migrants and addressing the impact of uncertainty in their lives.
This panel seeks to explore workers' resistance by discussing how audiovisual representations com... more This panel seeks to explore workers' resistance by discussing how audiovisual representations communicate their precarious experiences. How can we understand, analyse and support workers' resistance through audiovisual methods? We welcome current and past reflections on worker's rights and resistances, encouraging feminist and political ecological approaches.
How can we understand, analyse and support workers' resistance through audiovisual methods? This panel seeks abstracts that explore the marginalized actors within labour structures, as the active agents of localized intersubjective knowledge, rather than mere resources of a capitalist commodity chain (Haraway, 1988). In the past century worker's rights have been advanced through popular (collective) resistance. However, workers' precarity remains a current issue affected by neoliberal policies and recent COVID-19 regulations as seen in continuing global protests, from factory workers to white collar flex jobs. We are interested in the construction of these resistances through 'sonic images'; "the set of postures, body movements, expressions, gestures" that expose the workers' social and political context through their affective relations, modes of performance and everyday forms of survival (D'Amico, 2015:2). These include localized audiovisual production among workers, which serve to disrupt "comfortable [visual] boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules" (Mitchell 1992: 223), create empathy in shared feelings of social immobility and entrapment, or other acts of resistance or forms collective or collaborative activism. The focus on audiovisual representation questions how existing forms of visualization of localised labour build a ubiquitous form of knowledge across the chain. It aims to draw attention to how the visualization of embodied forms of labour experience can help us understand the social issues and environmental sustainability within different industries. We encourage feminist and political ecological approaches that consider workers as active members of their environments who work to reshape dominant economic and gender norms that shape such environment.
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How can we understand, analyse and support workers' resistance through audiovisual methods? This panel seeks abstracts that explore the marginalized actors within labour structures, as the active agents of localized intersubjective knowledge, rather than mere resources of a capitalist commodity chain (Haraway, 1988). In the past century worker's rights have been advanced through popular (collective) resistance. However, workers' precarity remains a current issue affected by neoliberal policies and recent COVID-19 regulations as seen in continuing global protests, from factory workers to white collar flex jobs. We are interested in the construction of these resistances through 'sonic images'; "the set of postures, body movements, expressions, gestures" that expose the workers' social and political context through their affective relations, modes of performance and everyday forms of survival (D'Amico, 2015:2). These include localized audiovisual production among workers, which serve to disrupt "comfortable [visual] boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules" (Mitchell 1992: 223), create empathy in shared feelings of social immobility and entrapment, or other acts of resistance or forms collective or collaborative activism. The focus on audiovisual representation questions how existing forms of visualization of localised labour build a ubiquitous form of knowledge across the chain. It aims to draw attention to how the visualization of embodied forms of labour experience can help us understand the social issues and environmental sustainability within different industries. We encourage feminist and political ecological approaches that consider workers as active members of their environments who work to reshape dominant economic and gender norms that shape such environment.
How can we understand, analyse and support workers' resistance through audiovisual methods? This panel seeks abstracts that explore the marginalized actors within labour structures, as the active agents of localized intersubjective knowledge, rather than mere resources of a capitalist commodity chain (Haraway, 1988). In the past century worker's rights have been advanced through popular (collective) resistance. However, workers' precarity remains a current issue affected by neoliberal policies and recent COVID-19 regulations as seen in continuing global protests, from factory workers to white collar flex jobs. We are interested in the construction of these resistances through 'sonic images'; "the set of postures, body movements, expressions, gestures" that expose the workers' social and political context through their affective relations, modes of performance and everyday forms of survival (D'Amico, 2015:2). These include localized audiovisual production among workers, which serve to disrupt "comfortable [visual] boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules" (Mitchell 1992: 223), create empathy in shared feelings of social immobility and entrapment, or other acts of resistance or forms collective or collaborative activism. The focus on audiovisual representation questions how existing forms of visualization of localised labour build a ubiquitous form of knowledge across the chain. It aims to draw attention to how the visualization of embodied forms of labour experience can help us understand the social issues and environmental sustainability within different industries. We encourage feminist and political ecological approaches that consider workers as active members of their environments who work to reshape dominant economic and gender norms that shape such environment.