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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nI am an assistant professor in environmental and cultural sociology at the University of Tehran and an affiliate of the university\u2019s Institute for Environmental Studies. I received my Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cambridge, where I was a Queens\u2019 College Walker Scholar. My work develops social and political theory from the Global South\u2014particularly Iran\u2014and 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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n My book, Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran<\/em> (Princeton University Press, 2023), offers one of the most sustained studies of the relationships between materiality, language, and power. Published in Princeton\u2019s 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<\/em>, American Ethnologist<\/em>, Social Forces<\/em>, Cultural Sociology<\/em>, Contemporary Sociology<\/em>, Social Anthropology<\/em>, Choice Reviews<\/em>, H\u2011Material Culture<\/em>, Middle East Journal<\/em>, and British Journal of Middle East Studies<\/em>. I have been invited to present the book at Yale University, Columbia University, The New School, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, LSE, UCL, University of Duisburg-Essen, and VU Amsterdam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My work appears in peer-reviewed journals, including Sociological Theory<\/em>; International Political Sociology<\/em>; Media, Culture & Society<\/em>; Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies<\/em>; International Journal of Baudrillard Studies<\/em>; Fa\u1e63ln\u0101me-ye Mu\u1e6d\u0101li\u02bb\u0101t va Ta\u1e25q\u012bq\u0101t-e Ejtem\u0101\u02bb\u012b<\/em> (in Farsi); and Fa\u1e63ln\u0101me-ye Mu\u1e6d\u0101li\u02bb\u0101t-e Farhang\u012b va Erteb\u0101\u1e6d\u0101t<\/em> (in Farsi), as well as in literary magazines such as Michigan Quarterly Review<\/em> and Majal-e Aftaab<\/em> (in Farsi). I also edited the special issue \u201cIran in Materiality\u201d for Iranian Studies<\/em>, the leading interdisciplinary journal on the Persianate world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My current book project, titled The Sociocene<\/em>, builds theory from Iran by following the material practices through which “the social” acquired historical durability as an epistemic field. 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<\/em> 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. Situated within overlapping imperial formations while never formally colonized, Iran offers an unusually revealing archive of the labor that assembled such modern distinctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The project has taken theoretical shape through my recent work on secularization and ecology. My forthcoming article, \u201cThe Social as the Epistemic Afterlife of Secularism,\u201d was written at the invitation of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies<\/em> for a forum on Mohamed Amer Meziane\u2019s The States of the Earth<\/em>, alongside contributions by \u00c9tienne 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 \u201cthe social.\u201d The central claim of this article is that as the epistemic afterlife of heaven\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\nContact<\/h2>\n