Art-based learning practices for gender empowerment and social change

Dr. Aytak Dibavar (they/she) is a queer Iranian artist, activist, feminist educator, and former human rights lawyer with more than 15 years of commitment to social justice, queer liberation, and feminist activism both in Iran and Canada. Aytak’s work/research is entangled with feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist knowledge production and creative/art-based teaching practices. For more than a decade, Aytak has developed a dual academic and activist career on issues pertaining to women’s and LGBTQIA+ community’s rights – specifically related to trauma survivors, resettlement, and barriers to education and workplace access. Aytak has a great passion for people and their lived experiences and is interested in life narratives; the ways in which people make sense of their own lives, whether and how they narrate them to others, and why they remain silent about them. Aytak loves creating art; through painting, printmaking, poetry, and performance, they explore topics pertaining to social justice issues. Their pedagogy is also informed by art-based and creative practices.

Dibavar is also a multidisciplinary artist. Their research has been transformed into various creative and multimedia projects, including an award-winning theatre production, mixed-media artwork, and solo art exhibitions.

In broad terms, Aytak’s work addresses the persistent absence and erasure of queer and trans experiences from the Global South in existing scholarship on queer futurity. They focus on developing a framework that incorporates diasporic queer voices, especially the displaced, exiled, and silence/d, in theorizing decolonial queer imaginaries. Aytak’s forthcoming monograph with Columbia University Press (Spring 2025), titled Shadows of Nothingness: Queering Absence and Silence in Global Politics, moves through Islamic Sufism, queer theory, and postcolonial feminist readings of quantum physics to reframe our understanding of silence, absence, and nothingness. Aytak’s journal articles has appeared in the journals of Global Constitutionalism, Kohl, Critical Studies on Security, The Site Magazine,Refuge, AGITATE!: Unsettling Knowledges, and Journal of Narrative Politics among many others. In addition, they have handful of published or forthcoming book chapters in edited volumes.

Through their scholarship and art, Aytak journey’s with their own and others’ familial silences and in this way, she seeks to understand how individuals' political identity (or their engagement with the political) have been shaped through the historical intersectional experiences of trauma and political oppression.

In order to explore the transmission of trauma in the private sphere, she engages with narrative approaches that provide access to the personal and lived experiences of survivors and their children. Their research has developed a theory of political trauma that understands the private sphere as a key vector for the transmission of identity in states where the essential artefacts of public life are tightly controlled.

Aytak’s doctoral work was supported by the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Scholarship and SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

Publications

Art

How can one be responsible to the silence of a space? How can one acknowledge its hauntings, phantoms, and colonial pasts if they are deemed irrelevant, invisible, void—reduced to nothingness?

How can one be responsible to the silence of a space? How can one acknowledge its hauntings, phantoms, and colonial pasts if they are deemed irrelevant, invisible, void—reduced to nothingness?

Aytak Akbari-Dibavar