We are pleased to announce this upcoming event with guest speaker Sona Kazemi! This event is sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities

Sona Kazemi

Disabling Relations: Injured Bodyminds & Active Witnessing

Thursday, January 14, 2021 3:00pm- 4:30pm

Registration required: https://bit.ly/DS-Jan14

Accessibility Information

ASL interpretation and CART captioning will be provided at this event.

Abstract

While settler-colonialism has received some attention in Disability Studies, imperialism has largely remained unexplored. In this talk, Kazemi examines the effects of imperialist politics—as enacted by Russia, China, the United States, Western Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Iran—to understand how disabled bodies are generated through gendered, raced, and classed violence. She seeks in particular to shed light on the forms of theocratic state violence in parts of the Middle East where Islam is the religion of the state (namely Iran and Saudi Arabia), by critiquing religious fundamentalism as an ideology and as a state apparatus. She differentiates between critique of fundamentalism and existing racist discourses of Orientalism. In doing so, Kazemi offers a critique that de-centers the global north while drawing attention to the social and political issues so frequently left out of academic discussion. Sona Kazemi is the Research Justice at the Intersections (RJI) Fellow at Mills College. Her postdoctoral work includes studies of Yazidi refugees in diaspora and their disability consciousness as survivors of genocide and ethnic cleansing; the mental health of Iranian and Kurdish refugees in the United States; Iranian women survivors of acid attack and their disability and feminist consciousness, and punitive limb amputation in Saudi Arabia and Iran. She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Disabling Relations: Injured Bodyminds and Active Witnessing.

Bio:

Dr. Sona Kazemi is currently the Provost’s Research Justice at the Intersections Fellow at the Mills College in Oakland, California. From 2018 to 2020, Sona was the postdoctoral researcher of Migration Studies, Disability Studies, and Medical Humanities at the Ohio State University. Her research program is located in contradictions among transnational disability rights frameworks in the context of global and regional imperialism(s), as well as the proxy wars in the Middle East. Her postdoctoral projects concerns traumatized Yazidi refugees in diaspora and their disability consciousness as survivors of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the mental health of Iranian and Kurdish refugees in the United States who are the survivors of state terror and its implications for international security, Iranian women survivors of acid attack and their disability and feminist consciousness, and punitive limb amputation in Saudi Arabia and Iran. She is also completing a monograph, tentatively titled Disabling Relations: Injured Bodyminds and Active Witnessing, based on her dissertation and her two postdoctoral research projects. Sona is the Society for Disability Studies’ 2018 recipient of the honorable mention for the prestigious Irving K. Zola Award for emerging scholars in Disability Studies. Sona is currently the associate editor for the Global Ideas' Section at Review of Disability Studies, an International Journal.

For more information and/or questions, please email Mark Harniss, mharniss@uw.edu