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Dr Saba Zavarei is a Visiting Research Fellow from 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025
At the intersection of performance studies and human geography, I study the relationship between bodies and public spaces. I create socially-engaged, site-specific and placemaking projects, through which I explore how bodies produce, use or transgress their everyday spaces. Inspired by my background in architecture, my practice-based research examines citizen鈥檚 agency in changing places.
In my forthcoming monograph (Cambridge University Press), I explore how women are changing Iranian society through their transgressive performances of everyday life.
My research interests and expertise span the fields of practice-based research, performance studies, human geography, civic design, participation, socially-engaged and site-specific practice, placemaking, gender and space, art and politics, protest art, Iran and the Middle East.
Project Description
For the period of my fellowship at the IAS, I will be working on the relationship of migration, cities and everyday performances. This project looks into exiles鈥� relationship with their everyday spaces, through an interdisciplinary lens of performance studies and human geography, while it will also draw on migration studies, feminist geography and participatory art practice.
It particularly explores the contradictory conditions that exiles find themselves in, when moving听from one place to another, from estrangement to the sense of consistency. This research looks at听exile through acts of the everyday and their interactions with places. As its case study, it looks at how听Iranian women abroad find detaching from places of oppression liberating, and perform other听selves, but also use their critical distance as a way to politically intervene in the sociopolitical fabric听of their home society.
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