Kusha Sefat

I am an assistant professor in environmental and cultural sociology at the University of Tehran and an affiliate of the university’s Institute for Environmental Studies. I received my Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cambridge, where I was a Queens’ College Walker Scholar. My work develops social and political theory from the Global South—particularly Iran—and from Indigenous communities in the Americas, especially the United States. I publish in both English and Farsi and sit on the editorial boards of several journals, including Cultural Sociology.

My book, Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran (Princeton University Press, 2023), offers one of the most sustained studies of the relationships between materiality, language, and power. Published in Princeton’s Cultural Sociology Series, it demonstrates how the dynamism between everyday objects and words generates domination, rupture, and war as qualitatively distinct social fields, with each constellation affording and foreclosing unique modes of political action in post-revolutionary Iran. The book has been reviewed in American Journal of Sociology, American Ethnologist, Social Forces, Cultural Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Social Anthropology, H‑Material Culture, Choice, Middle East Journal, and British Journal of Middle East Studies. I have been invited to present the book at Yale University, Columbia University, The New School, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, LSE, UCL, the University of Duisburg-Essen, and VU Amsterdam.

My work appears in peer-reviewed journals, as well as in literary magazines, including Sociological Theory; International Political Sociology; Media, Culture & Society; Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies; International Journal of Baudrillard Studies; Michigan Quarterly Review; Faṣlnāme-ye Muṭāliʻāt va Taḥqīqāt-e Ejtemāʻī (in Farsi); and Faṣlnāme-ye Muṭāliʻāt-e Farhangī va Ertebāṭāt (in Farsi). I also edited a special issue of Iranian Studies on “Iran and Materiality,” bringing together leading scholars in the field who offer alternative interpretations of the histories of Iran by foregrounding the generative role of nonhumans across politics, culture, economy, and religion.

My current book project, titled The Sociocene, investigates “the social” as an epistemic field that allows secularization to appear as a human, collective, and progressive project even as it devastates the earth. Across the social sciences, “the social” names a neutral domain of relations or a universal register of collectivity that is presumed to exist prior to analysis. My book approaches this apparent neutrality historically. It argues that the social is not merely too narrow to include animals, lands, and non-Europeans; it is historically structured to exclude them. The social’s boundaries are not accidental, nor are they simply the product of disciplinary blind spots. They are the outcome of a broader epistemic transformation in which empire and modernity redefined the conditions of history, sovereignty, and meaning.

Building theory from Iran, the book follows the material practices through which this epistemic project acquired historical durability. The question it poses is not when “the social” became thinkable, but how it became inhabitable. How did the exclusion of animals take material form in slaughterhouses, veterinary regimes, museums, and urban plans? How did the externalization of the Earth become embedded in property law, fossil-fuel infrastructures, and altered relations of dwelling? And how did the representation of colonized peoples as being behind become sedimented in archives, scientific classifications, and developmental schemes? Far from separate histories, these are different moments in the materialization of a single epistemic project from which to approach the ecological crisis anew. Situated within overlapping imperial formations while never formally colonized, Iran offers an unusually revealing archive of the labor that assembled such modern distinctions.

The project has taken theoretical shape through my recent work on secularization and ecology. My forthcoming article, “The Social as the Epistemic Afterlife of Secularism,” was written at the invitation of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies for a forum on Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth, alongside contributions by Étienne Balibar and Thangam Ravindranathan. The article argues that the ecological and racial consequences of secularization presuppose an epistemic ground that itself remains largely uninterrogated. In addition to reorganizing domination over territory, populations, and the subsoil, secularization also produces a specific field of intelligibility within which these reorganizations appear coherent and human. That field is what modern thought has come to call “the social.” The central claim of this article is that as the epistemic afterlife of heaven’s displacement, the social is the conceptual infrastructure through which secular reason stabilizes its authority after transcendence has ostensibly been abolished. My book expands this argument by asking: through what material practices, institutions, and historical transformations did this epistemic order become durable? The construction of the human in negation of animality, the reorganization of land, and the racialization of labor in Iran provide this question with part of its archive.

I am an immigrant and grew up in Tehran (Iran), Mumbai and Pune (India), and Lexington, Atlanta, and Long Beach (U.S.). I received my MA in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and my BA in political science from California State University, Long Beach. While in Long Beach, I was a ska and reggae musician with Skunk Records and performed with Jah Fellowship, Chapter 11, and Tomorrow’s Bad Seeds.