Collaborative Projects
I was seventeen when I began working with the Children’s Rights Protection Association (انجمن حمایت از حقوق کودکان), at its branch in Shoush ( Khaneh-e Koodak-e Shoush – خانه کودک شوش), a poor working-class neighborhood in Tehran where many Afghan families displaced by war had settled. At first, I taught Farsi literacy to Afghan refugee children—many undocumented, many already working in markets or construction sites. We read aloud, played with words, and created stories that moved between fantasy and the realities of their everyday lives. Soon after, I began collaborating with Amu Khayat in his project (پروژه عمو خیاط), weaving performance and storytelling into the literacy classes. Together with the children, we staged small dramas, improvising stories and asking them to continue the tales we began. These playful scenes became not only a way to learn language, but also a means to reimagine their worlds. Through this early work, I learned how poverty, nationality, migration, and ethnicity intersect to deny children basic rights like education long before they have a chance to shape their own paths.
A shared joke, a shared laugh and small moments of joy at Khaneh-e Koodak-e Shoush early 2000s
Undergraduate Years: Activism, Research, and Collective Work
As an undergraduate in sociology at the University of Tehran, my horizons widened, and so did the scope of my collaborative work. I began volunteering with two more NGOs—Society for Defending Street and Labor Children (جمعیت دفاع از کودکان کار و خیابان) and Association for the Protection of Child Laborers (انجمن حمایت از کودکان کار)—where I continued literacy teaching and workshops with Afghan children and families. Over time, I expanded my work to Afghan mothers and teenage girls, gathering in circles to talk, sometimes hesitantly, about the body, menstruation, puberty, and shame. We searched for words that did not exist, for ways to name and share experiences long kept in silence. These sessions sometimes ended in laughter, bread and tea, other times in tears, but they always carried a sense of dialogue, care, and dignity.
Alongside this work, I immersed myself in women’s history and activism in Iran. With friends, I organized events on campus, including an International Women’s Day gathering that left a lasting impression on me. As secretary of the student council, I helped to coordinate student initiatives, and in 2005 I co-produced and co-directed a documentary, Human, Industry, Work (انسان، صنعت، کار), which examined workers’ conditions—particularly women’s health—in private factories. The project revealed how gender and ethnicity compound exploitation, even within the same economic class. During these years, I also collaborated with faculty in national reseach about women’s NGOs in Iran, learning how women used these spaces to build networks of support and solidarity. I also worked as a sociology expert with national level projects on tourism, traveling to villages around Iran to study local potentials for tourism. In these visits, I spoke with young women who lacked equal access to education and were bound by patriarchal traditions, as well as with older residents who carried the weight of being marginalized.
Master’s Studies and Archival Work
After my master’s studies and my thesis on wome’s everyday life during late Qajar era (1865-1890), I joined Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (WWQI), a digital archive directed by Afsaneh Najmabadi and hosted at Harvard University. As a senior research assistant based in Iran, I traveled between national libraries, private collections, and homes. I sat with women in their eighties, guardians of family histories, listening as they unfolded letters, shared photographs, and recounted stories never spoken even to their own children. Alongside this archival work, I collaborated on NGO projects focused on people who were blind or living with severe visual impairment. Through these encounters, I learned about another layer of exclusion: how ableism structures daily life, from unsafe city infrastructure to systemic neglect.
Homepage of the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran website
Beyond Borders: Collective Work with Refugees, Activists, and Communities in Turkey and the United States
When I moved to Turkey, I carried these lessons of collective work into new contexts. There, I connected with feminist groups and Kaos GL association, meeting activists and listening to the stories of displaced people. We traveled to different cities in Turkey, speaking with more than 300 refugees from Iran and Afghanistan. Out of our meetings, woven through conversations, workshops, and even the shared act of painting, emerged a collective publication of stories. These stories, carried across Turkish, Arabic, English, and Farsi, were not simply translated texts but traces of a collective attempt to turn the invisible into the visible, to resist the silencing of marginalized lives, and to insist on their presence in public memory. In working alongside activists from Turkey, I came to see how grassroots collective work resists the boundaries of language, gender, and nation. Listening to refugees, I learned about the layered forms of discrimination and exploitation they endured—health issues, social isolation, lack of recognition, and the precarity of daily life. These experiences sharpened my understanding of intersectionality: how sexuality, gender, nationality, and refugee status converge to magnify vulnerability, and how grassroots solidarity can be the only safety net in the absence of state protection. Through this collaborative work, new feminist and queer friendships emerged that continue to sustain me to this day.
Arriving in the United States in 2020, I stepped into new terrains of collective work. At Syracuse University, I started working with refugee-background Somali youth at the North Side Center, but then came the pandemic, revealing how crises, though shared, weigh unevenly. To survive, together with friends—single mothers, international students, women of color, LGBTQI+ students—we created a fragile yet vital feminist space of care. We told our stories, listened across difference, and imagined survival in common. From this practice grew a collective essay, “Pandemic within a Pandemic (within a Pandemic): Unraveling a Pedagogy of Possibilities.” For me it was less a publication than a testimony to resilience, showing how storytelling itself can be resistance, a way to weave solidarity in times of isolation. In summer 2021, I joined Feminist Freedom Warriors, a transnational feminist digital project that combines an open-access book with recorded conversations, allowing readers and listeners alike to engage the voices of scholar-activists across different locales. These voices reminded me that solidarities must be built across borders without erasing difference, and that grassroots practices hold the power to unsettle dominant frameworks of knowledge.
Feminist Freedom Warriors (FFW) is a digital archive of cross-generational conversations with feminist scholar-activists, created by Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda Carty in collaboration with students and comrades in struggle.
Carrying this spirit with me, I arrived at the University of Illinois, where I made collective work a central part of my academic life. Within my department, I co-organized conferences and workshops designed especially with international and first-generation students in mind, building infrastructures of support that we ourselves had long needed. Beyond the department, I helped sustain cultural initiatives, organizing readings, performances, and panels that brought diasporic and local communities into conversation. One of them was an intergenerational gathering of voices, of many genders, ethnicities, and histories, who came together to weave stories of inequity and resistance. Over late nights and quiet dawns, between tears, laughter, and embraces, we wrote, danced, and sang our memories into being. From this shared labor of love, a performance emerged; an offering of courage and connection across borders.
The boldest of these initiatives was Common Differences II: Transnational Feminist Resistance(s) Against Contemporary Violence(s) (2024), a conference I initiated and co-organized. Supported by multiple centers, colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education, the conference became a rare space of feminist knowledge production across languages, regions, and generations. We held panels in English, Spanish, and Arabic with simultaneous translation, and invited conversations ranging from diaspora and transnational solidarity to LGBTQI+ activism in Turkey, feminist approaches to transitional justice in Africa, health equity in Latin America, and the precarious lives of Afghan refugees at Iran’s borders.
Through these collective experiences I have learned as much from people as from any text. From Afghan refugee children in Tehran, older women guarding family archives, feminist comrades in Iran, LGBTQI+ refugees in Turkey, and circles of care in the United States, I witnessed how dignity and belonging take root in the most precarious conditions. These encounters taught me that feminist knowledge is never solitary—it is made in relation, through struggles shared and solidarities forged. In these spaces of collectivity, we carry one another, share pain and strength, and practice what bell hooks called the “politics of hope,” a radical insistence on possibility, even in the face of despair.
