The Brooklyn Rail
WOMXN, LIFE, FREEDOM is an online event series for co-learning, co-growing, solidarity, and kinship with our Iranian siblings. We come together as artists, thinkers, and organizers,mainly in the diaspora, to share, amplify, and weave together a refusal of long-lasting cultural and political gender/sexual oppression in Iran. Our third and last live virtual event titled “Transnational Feminism: Womxn, Life, Freedom is a Daily Practice,” Features Aytak Akbari-Dibaavar, Shokoofeh Dezfuli, Katayoun Keshavarzi, and Morehshin Allahyari, with Persis M. Karim.
CTV Interview
An interview with the hosts of CTV Your Morning on the untold tales of Iranian queer community and an exclusive short live performance of The Little Black Fish.
FEATURED GUEST APPEARANCES
Just Participation Podcast
The fifth episode of Just Participation concerns art-spaced social justice work and decolonizing our minds. Student host Zeynep Yilmaz interviews the researchers and practitioners Dr. Paola Ardiles Gamboa, Dr. Syrus Marcus, and Dr. Aytak Akbari-Dibavar. Each guest explores how to engage students with decision making through experimental, interactive, and progressive methods of learning. The projects by our guests have developed innovation, futurism, and postcolonialism through the fine arts and social activism.
The Queer Arabs Podcast
This week we were joined by Iranian-Canadian lawyer, researcher, and writer Aytak Dibavar for an episode focused on the recent uprisings in Iran following Jina (Mahsa) Amini’s murder by “morality” police. Aytak discussed aspects of the movement that have been neglected in mainstream media and discussion, including Jina’s Kurdish identity, its working class roots, and the inclusion of queer voices. We also discuss the historical context of American intervention in Iran and previous protest movements, often absent from Western coverage. We discuss the hesitancy of international leftists in speaking out–whether due to oversimplified ideas of anti-interventionism or concerns of promoting Islamophobia–and the importance of doing so anyway. Finally, Aytak considers what it could look like to build transnational feminist solidarity network based on personal autonomy and ending cisheteropatriarchy across different cultural contexts.
Pedagogies of Hope
With a help of a SSHRC connection grant, I have initiated a collective called Pedagogies of Hope. Pedagogies of Hope is a community of scholars, artists and activists that practice pedagogies that transgress the boundaries of mainstream learning and teaching. Addressing challenges that students face post-pandemic, Pedagogies of Hope aims to support pedagogical innovation through a community knowledge exchange workshop.
