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

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.

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

CART and ASL will be provided at the event. Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by January 4 to Simpson Center Events, 206-685-5260, scevents@uw.edu