Women, Life, Freedom: The Iranian Feminist Uprising in Context

AC4 co-sponsored Women, Life, Freedom: The Iranian Feminist Uprising in Context alongside the Athena Center for Leadership at Barnard College on October 17, 2022. 

*This is a virtual event. You will receive a link to join the webinar via email in advance of the event.*

Join Barnard faculty member Manijeh Moradian and attorney and advocate Azadeh Shahshahani for a conversation about the women-led protests in Iran that have captured the attention of women around the world. What are Iranian women and men fighting for, and why? How can we understand this uprising in the historical context of Iranian society and also in relation to movements against patriarchal authoritarianism globally?

This virtual conversation will be moderated by Umbreen Bhatti '00, Constance Hess Williams '66 Director of the Athena Center for Leadership at Barnard, as part of SPARK, Athena's 2022-2023 series on protest, and is co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and AC4, the Program for Partnerships at Earth Institute, Columbia Climate School.

Manijeh Moradian is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and former co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers. Her forthcoming book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States (Duke University Press, October 2022), discusses the women's uprising in Tehran in 1979 and recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s.

Azadeh Shahshahani is a human rights attorney and Legal & Advocacy Director at Project South. She has worked for more than 15 years in the U.S. South to protect and defend immigrant and Muslim communities. She previously served as president of the National Lawyers Guild. Azadeh is the author of human rights reports, law review articles, and book chapters focused on movement lawyering, immigrants’ rights, surveillance of Muslim-Americans, and people's liberation movements.

SPARK is a series of provocations and conversations designed to ignite your thinking about change and how it happens. Through interviews, book talks, field trips, film screenings, and more, you'll get to know the women and nonbinary people leading change in a wide range of areas, and learn more about the hard, but important, work of building a better future. SPARK is open to all members of the Barnard community, including faculty, staff, alumnae, and friends of the college.