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This post is dedicated to Asad Haider, who left us few days ago, whose scholarship continues to enable difficult recognitions, and to Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi (1936-1985), whose stories remain dangerous precisely because they make visible what power requires remain unseen. I’m a doctoral researcher working on the politics and aesthetics of utopia. My dissertation
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It is hard to write about the person you lost. A teacher you loved from the heart but now is just a memory. Asad awakens my inner teacher and inner guru. So, I ask myself: isn’t he still in me, alive? This question momentarily eases the pain of his loss and grief and invites me
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Introduction Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan (1651) amid the tumultuous English Civil War (1642-1651), a period that profoundly shaped his political philosophy. Having witnessed Parliament’s rebellion against Charles I, the king’s execution in 1649, and the collapse of traditional authority, Hobbes experienced firsthand the chaos that ensues when sovereign power disintegrates. The war claimed an estimated
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I argue that states violate the social contract not merely through physical violence but through deliberate information control that denies citizens their fundamental rights to know and communicate. This dual violence—physical and epistemic—creates a crisis of political legitimacy that demands reimagining the social contract beyond national boundaries and temporal limitations. These three patterns—linguistic erasure, ethical…
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Abstract This essay examines political culture through Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic theory as presented in Anti-Oedipus. It challenges conventional understandings of political socialization found in political science literature. The analysis argues that political culture operates as an Oedipal apparatus reproducing dominant power structures, with the family serving as capitalism’s delegated agent of psychic repression. By
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This summer, I embarked on a new chapter of my academic journey: teaching my first independently designed tutorial.As part of POLS 1000 – Introduction to Politics, I have the opportunity to not only engage students with foundational political concepts, but also to explore how these ideas come alive through stories, films, and our shared cultural
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Introduction This summer, I have the pleasure of teaching POLS 1000 Tutorial 2: Introduction to Politics – Exploring the Democratic Experience at York University. I have the honour of assisting Professor Sergei Plekhanov in teaching this course.Professor Plekhanov’s syllabus—shaped by his many years of teaching Introduction to Politics and International Politics—provided a rich and thoughtful
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How an exiled playwright diagnosed the persistence of gendered violence across Iran’s revolutionary divide Introduction: The Physician Who Diagnosed Violence Through Drama When I first encountered the plays of Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, I was struck by how this physician-turned-playwright used his clinical gaze to diagnose something more profound than physical ailments—the way violence inscribes itself on
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Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi and the Politics of Imagination In December 2024, a provocative act—the desecration of Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi’s grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery by pro-monarchist factions—provoked widespread condemnation across Iran’s fragmented political spectrum. From state-run media to diaspora cultural forums, the response was swift and unexpectedly unified. Though quickly removed from social media platforms, the incident