News & Events

The BILQIS ERC Project, Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, University of Galway will host the following two events on 5^th December 2024 with Dr. Chowra Makaremi, CNRS

Chowra Makaremi is a CNRS tenured researcher in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. She leads the ERC research program OFF-SITE: Violence, State formation and memory politics: an off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran.

1. Lecture and Q&A:

The Counter-Archives of the Long Iranian Revolution
1:00 – 2.30pm

This is a hybrid event, please register here for Zoom access.

How can we rethink and adapt the production of empirical knowledge in contexts of violence and impunity, by unfolding the multi-faceted relationship between archives and power? The circulation of people, data, forms of knowledge (investigative forensics, cartography, oral history projects), and actions (people’s tribunals, missing people databases, universal jurisdiction) challenge the relations between power and knowledge when it comes to archives. Notably, various transnational forms of activism have the purpose or effect of producing scattered, incomplete documentation that subvert or challenge knowledge and narratives constructed within nation-state borders and power politics. However, engaging in this counter-hegemonic archival resistance comes at the risk of being reshaped by standardized legal, epistemic, moral grammars and norms. The presentation explores the world of, and the worlds narrated by, these counter-archives through the case of post-revolutionary Iran, and the “long” Iranian revolution (1979-1989).

2. Film Screening:

Hitch. An Iranian Story at 5:00 PM

A documentary film by Chowra Makaremi / 71 min /  2019

(Photo by Alfred Yaghobzadeh)

Hitch : An Iranian Story intertwines history with family stories after the Iranian revolution of 1979, its betrayals and its consequences. The film is an insider look into the experience of political violence, and how it feeds representations, images, speeches and the things unsaid. The daughter of an opponent to the Islamic Republic who was imprisoned, tortured and killed, the filmmaker resists political negationism by bringing out the extermination of Iranian opponents through the presence of objects and the persistence of memory.

Both events will take place in Room AMB-G065 Training Room 1, Arts Millennium Building, University of Galway

All are welcome. For any queries, please email bilqis@universityofgalway.ie.