I am a project manager, administrative assistant, and aspiring lawyer with a deep commitment to integrating arts and aesthetics into practical work—whether in engineering projects, legal advocacy, or community initiatives. My professional experience has taught me that the most transformative projects emerge when technical expertise meets creative imagination, and when justice-oriented work draws on aesthetic practices to envision and create alternative futures.
I am a PhD candidate at York University, and my dissertation explores Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi’s dramatic collaborations through the lens of Utopian studies. This framework enables me to examine both the political and aesthetic dimensions of his works, revealing how texts like The Cow, The Cycle, and Othello in Wonderland not only critique the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic regimes but actively engage in political practice. In other words, there is no dichotomy between his art and his politics, nor between his criticism and his actions.
More specifically, I argue that Sa’edi addresses three central problems in utopian studies. First, the problem of abstraction: Sa’edi confronts this through his use of magical realism, especially in The Mourners of Bayal, grounding utopian imagination in material conditions rather than wishful thinking. This method enables him to offer a nuanced view of religion, which has often functioned as a form of abstract utopianism in Iran. Crucially, his portrait of religion remains immanent—rather than demanding its eradication, he offers an immanent critique that works through religious practices and beliefs themselves. Second, the dilemma of privatization of hope and the impossibility of collective action: I demonstrate how The Cycle addresses this by revealing pathways for collective resistance even under conditions of extreme oppression. Finally, the nightmare of totalitarian closure that has haunted utopian literature: Sa’edi confronts this in Othello in Wonderland through the strategic use of satire as form, which resists the authoritarian impulse to fix meaning and control interpretation.
This dissertation illuminates the possibilities for emancipatory politics under authoritarian and colonial conditions, arguing that artistic works operating independently of state institutions can create autonomous spaces that pave the way for radical democracy.