Minoo Moallem

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Dr Minoo Moallem is a Gender & Women’s Studies professor and the Director of Media Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of  Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity (Routledge, 2018). Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, (University of California Press, 2005 ), and…

Fatemeh Sadeghi

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Dr Fatemeh Sadeghi is a political scientist specialized in political thought and gender studies. She previously researched on gender ethics in Islamic sharia and Zoroastrianism, gender in nationalism and Islamism, Islamist politics, and Iranian Revolution. She also studied the unveiling campaign of the first Pahlavi Iran and the compulsory hijab of the Islamic Republic. In recent years she worked on the constitutional thought in…

Yalda Hamidi

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Dr. Yalda Hamidi is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University. She is interested in transnational and Islamic feminisms, feminist pedagogy, and feminist cultural and literary studies. Her article, “Politics of Location in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis” is under publication in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. In 2020, she published “Locating Sickness:…

Woman Life Freedom: A Panel on the Protests in Iran

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Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died while in the custody of the Iranian Guidance Patrol, has become the symbol of the massive protests in Iran. Iranian women have been in the forefront of the protests, removing their hijabs and/or cutting their hair. In this conversation, Professors Yalda Hamidi, Minoo Moallem, and Fatemeh…

For Life, When Death Crumbles

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By Sima Shakhsari Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish-Iranian woman, died in the hospital on September 16, 2022, three days after being arrested by the Iranian Guidance Patrol (also known as the “morality police” in English ) for her alleged “improper hijab.” Her murder became the mobilizing cry for the massive protests that have…

Statement in Support of the Iranian People’s Protests

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By Faculty and Students at the University of Minnesota As faculty and graduate students at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, we stand in solidarity with the Iranian people who are outraged by the mysterious death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish woman, who was killed while in the custody of the Iranian…

Dear Rohith…

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By Ponni Arasu This letter is part of Holding Movements, Agitating Epistemes: A Multipart Series On Remembering, Retelling, And Dreaming For Justice co-convened and co-edited by Richa Nagar and Ponni Arasu. I dedicate this piece to Radhika Vemula, Rohith Vemula’s mother and to A. Mangai aka V. Padma, my mother. Two women who fight for…

AGITATE! Feminist Knowledge Production Event Series: Spring 2023

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AGITATE! Journal invites you to a series of virtual workshops and discussions hosted in conjunction with the “Feminist Knowledge Production” seminar taught by Professor Richa Nagar in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. February 9: Feminisms, Translations, Solidarities: A Workshop with the Translators and Editors of ‘The Purple…

All-India Campaign against Anti-People FCA Rules, 2022

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STOP FOREST CONSERVATION RULES 2022! STOP VIOLATION OF FOREST RIGHTS ACT AND RIGHTS OF GRAM SABHAS! STOP CORPORATE TAKE OVER OF FORESTS! PROTECT OUR JAL JANGAL JAMEEN JEEVIKA! As you know the new Forest (Conservation) Rules 2022 are pending in Parliament and may be passed any day in the Budget session. It is very important…

Urgent Appeal: Supporting Earthquake Relief in Turkey and Syria

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Dear AGITATE! Readers, As you know, a devastating earthquake and its aftershocks hit Turkey and Syria on Monday, 5th February, wreaking unimaginable destruction and loss of life in areas already struggling with political repression, displacement, and underdevelopment. More than 20,000 lives have been lost, and this number is expected to rise. Tens of thousands who…

DBAV anti-caste feminists’ statement condemning the Hathras case judgement

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On the remembrance day of anti-caste crusader Savitri Phule, we the daughters of Savitri from Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi-Vimukta communities strongly condemn the judgement of the Uttar Pradesh special court which acquitted all four accused –all dominant caste Thakur men – of a heinous gangrape and murder of a 19-year old Valmiki (oppressed caste) woman, in the Hathras…

Feminisms, Translations, Solidarities: A Conversation with the Translators and Editors of ‘The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics’

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In February 2023, AGITATE! launched our Feminist Knowledge Production event series, organized in collaboration with Richa Nagar’s graduate seminar on Feminist Knowledge Production at the University of Minnesota. We are pleased to share with you a recording of the first event in the series: a conversation with the translators and editors of ‘The Purple Color…

Poetry, Academia, and Feminist Knowledge-Making: A Workshop with Celina Su

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As part of AGITATE! Journal’s Feminist Knowledge Production Series, we invited Celina Su—scholar, poet, and member of AGITATE! Editorial Board— to conduct a workshop titled Poetry, Academia, and Feminist Knowledge-Making on March 30, 2023. In the workshop, whose recording we present here, Su discusses poetry as mode of social inquiry and as a vehicle for…

A Adams

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A Adams (they/them) is a PhD student in Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. They specialize in disability, rhetoric, and narrative. Outside of the university, A spends their time writing, playing competitive trading card games, and playing basketball.

I Want to Tell a Story: An (Alleged) Exercise in Knowledge Production

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By A Adams For the record, this is an attempt at engaging knowledge production through non-academic means, produced for a Feminist Knowledge Production Seminar taught by Richa Nagar at the University of Minnesota in Spring 2023. In it, I ask: how do we produce knowledge from precarity? What actually generates the means by which we…

Black Feminism and Hip Hop Pedagogy: A Workshop by Ruth Nicole Brown

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As part of AGITATE! Journal’s Feminist Knowledge Production Series, we invited Ruth Nicole Brown—scholar, artist, and member of AGITATE! Editorial Board— to conduct a workshop titled Black Feminism and Hip Hop Pedagogy on March 23, 2023. In the workshop, whose recording we present here, Professor Brown draws on her research on Black girls’ lived experiences…

Ruth Nicole Brown

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Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown is the Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her research and creative praxis explores how Black girls conceptualize freedom, creativity, and relationships in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT). Brown founded SOLHOT in 2006 as a collective space to celebrate Black girlhood and…

Transnational Solidarities in the Balkans: Migration Justice Worldmaking

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Transnational solidarities in the Balkans: migration justice worldmaking seeks to imagine and continue solidarity movement building with the migrants and refugees subjected to racial denigration, xenophobic refusals and rejection along the Balkan route and at the EU borders. The discussion amongst activists and comrades from Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia & Herzegovina stems from the struggles…

Drishadwati Bargi

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Drishadwati Bargi is a doctoral candidate in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota. She is soon to finish a dissertation on Dalit literature and anti caste cinema. Her interests include South Asian political writings and cinema, feminist theory and post structuralist theories of power and spectacle. She can be reached…

When the Functional is Political is Personal …Witnessing the Many Battles of Geeli Pucchi’s Bharati Mandal

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By Drishadwati Bargi In Indian cinema, we have encountered morally ambiguous lovers before. In Vishal Bharadwaj’s 2004 classic Maqbool, we see a relentlessly scheming Nimmi (played by the inimitable Tabu), flirting and courting with her lover/patron’s aide, treacherously aiding the former’s murder, and unleashing a tragedy that ultimately consumes everyone. We have seen the same…

A Collective Engagement with Critical Kashmir Studies

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The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies (New York: Routledge, 2022) edited by Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski & Deepti Misri By A. Adams, Missy Drew, Fatemeh Nasr Esfahani, Leith Ghuloum, Anna Goorevich, Natasha Hernández, Nina Kaushikkar, Vaishnavi Kollimarla, Pauline Maison-Dessemme, Nada Mohamed, Tahmina Sobat, Allie Thek, Nithya Rajan, and Richa Nagar Let me cry out…

Tahmina Sobat

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Tahmina Sobat is a women’s human rights lawyer from Afghanistan. She obtained a law degree from the Herat University of Afghanistan in 2015. Through the FPJRA scholarship, she earned her LLM degree in International Human Rights Law from the University of Notre Dame in 2020. She received a master’s degree in Gender and Women Studies…

Vaishnavi Kollimarla

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Vaishnavi is a performer and a MA/PhD student at the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is interested in exploring how performance is an important way of knowing, a pedagogy, and a medium through which we could explore questions of ethically co-existing with one another, in a world fraught…

Weaving ‘Trans-Communal Solidarities’: Responses and Reflections to AGITATE! Volume 4

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By Tahmina Sobat and Vaishnavi KollimarlaWith AGITATE! Editorial Collective, Participants in Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) graduate seminar on Ways of Knowing: Approaches to Knowledge and Truth (Fall 2022), Contributors to Volume 4 of AGITATE! Journal, and other speakers at Volume 4 launch.1   Over these past two years, the authors…

Marwan Makhoul

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Marwan Makhoul is a Palestinian poet, born in 1979 in the village of al-Boquai’a, Upper Galilee, to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. He works in engineering as a managing director of a construction company. He has several published works in poetry, prose and drama, including the poetry collections: Hunter of Daffodils, Land of the Sad Passiflora, Verses the Poems Forgot…

نیا غزہ

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وقت ختم ہو رہا ہے تو تم اپنی ماں کی کوکھ میں گھسٹتے نہ رہو میرے ننھے بیٹے جلدی پہنچو اسلیے نہیں کہ میں تمہارے لیے تڑپ رہا ہوں بلکہ آس لیے کہ جنگ چنگھاڑ رہی ہے مجھے ڈر ہے کہ تم اپنے وطن کو ویسا نہیں دیکھ پائو گے جیسا کہ میں چاہتا ہوں…

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நேரம் மிச்சமில்லை அம்மாவின் கருவில் இனியும் தங்கியிருக்காதே என் சின்ன குழந்தையே விரைந்து வா உனக்காக ஏங்குகிறேன் என்பதற்காக அல்ல இங்கு போர் நடந்து கொண்டிருக்கிறது என்பதற்காகதான் நீ பார்க்க வேண்டும் என்று நான் விரும்பிய தேசத்தை நீ பார்க்காமல் போய்விடுவாய் என்கிற பயம் எனக்கு. உனது தேசம் நிலமல்ல நமது விதியை முன்பறிந்து மரித்த கடலும் அல்ல: அது உன் மக்கள் குண்டுகள் அதை உருக்குலைப்பதற்கு முன்பு வந்து அதைப் பார் விட்டுச் சென்றவர்கள் எல்லாம்…