Sona Kazemi | University of Wisconsin La Crosse (original) (raw)

Papers by Sona Kazemi

Madness as Response-Ability Against State Terror, 2022

In this chapter, we engage with different forms of atrocities committed against imprisoned dissid... more In this chapter, we engage with different forms of atrocities committed against imprisoned dissidents in post-revolutionary Iran. This is just a sample of state violence at large against its own people, from whom it seeks legitimacy and validation. This time, legitimacy is sort by a theocratic state. Through a case study, we demonstrate how madness can be both a product of and a response to state violence, namely, imprisonment and torture. Kazemi interviewed more than 30 former political prisoners who survived torture and imprisonment in the 1980s in Iran, and, now, live in exile, as part of the Iranian diaspora. Their testimonies demonstrate how human resilience can overcome the harshest of circumstances,

Abstract Editorial for Global Perspectives section of Review of Disability Studies, v17 i2. Keyw... more Abstract
Editorial for Global Perspectives section of Review of Disability Studies, v17 i2.
Keywords: acid attacks, gender based violence, multilingualism, transnational
Another issue of our long envisioned and politically imperative issue of the Global Perspective Section of the journal is here. As we had imagined this section, we hope to create a space for multilingualism as a framework, political endeavor, accessibility commitment, and a cultural setting where languages appear more than an identity marker or private possession of a community. Creating this section, we hope to complicate what is disability as injury, and what it means to become, and remain disabled under exploitative social relations and oppressive historical continuities and discontinuities. To this end, we strive to create a space that challenges what we think as “normative” disability consciousness, “normative” disabling conditions, and “normative” disability expression mobilized by patriarchal, colonial, fascist, theocratic, and imperialistic legacies.

https://rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1083/2395, 2021

Vengeance in Crime A stage production by Drama Workshop Featuring three survivors of acid attack... more Vengeance in Crime
A stage production by Drama Workshop
Featuring three survivors of acid attacks,From Self-respectto the Stageproductionwas warmly acclaimed by a large audience. Mohsen Mortazavi,Maryam Zamani and ElhamSoltani starred in the play produced by Drama Workshopfollowing months of preparationand rehearsals. The theme of the production is centeredon raising awareness on the plight ofvictims of acid attacks and helping to fight ableismand change public perceptions.In this production, Nima is a 32-year-old son facingfamily conflict includingpersecution by his step-mother. He leaves home andbecomes involved in crime before fallingin love with Elham. The couple soon marry despite opposition from their respective families.However their new life is riddled with domestic violence thanks to Nima’s abusive behavior.

It is with great honor and privilege that we report our long envisioned, and politically imperati... more It is with great honor and privilege that we report our long envisioned, and politically imperative issue of the Global Perspective Section of the journal has finally materialized. As we had imagined this section, we hoped to create a space for multilingualism as a framework, political endeavor, accessibility commitment, and a cultural setting where languages appear more than an identity marker or private possession of a community. We have long believed that in some sense, multilingualism thrives when seemingly rigid monolingual communities see the need for crossing linguistic borders. All the same, crossing linguistic borders need not always involve bridge-making across languages. Instead, it can flourish amidst a spectrum of human expressions that can animate from nowhere. Because they are required to subvert rigid institutional arrangements, including the ones that accrue via linguistic hegemonies, disabled people and survivors of disabling traumas do go on to become active agents of such a multilingual crossover. For example, disabled people may straddle across myriad expressions and registers so as to handle a life replete with activism, corporeal pain, structural violence, discriminatory interpersonal bonding, and caregiving. In all these situations, disabled people feel the need to break open regularized linguistic borders that they are routinely pushed into. Very often, these linguistic borders remain constrained by a monochromatic idiom with a penchant for ableism. Apparently, when disabled people break free from such linguistic borders by a million means, they end up inventing novel modalities of multilingualism. Additionally, creating this section, we have hoped to complicate what it means to be, become, and remain disabled under exploitative social relations and oppressive historical continuities and discontinuities. To this end, we have strived to create a space that challenges what we think as "normative" disability expression, "normative" disabling conditions, and "normative" generational traumas mobilized by colonial, fascist, theocratic, and imperialistic legacies.

Disability and Multilingualism, 2021

Another issue of our long envisioned, and politically imperative issue of the Global Perspective ... more Another issue of our long envisioned, and politically imperative issue of the Global Perspective Section of the journal is here. As we had imagined this section, we hoped to create a space for multilingualism as a framework, political endeavor, accessibility commitment, and a cultural setting where languages appear more than an identity marker or private possession of a community. Creating this section, we have hoped to complicate what it means to be, become, and remain disabled under exploitative social relations and oppressive historical continuities and discontinuities. To this end, we have strived to create a space that challenges what we think as “normative” disability expression, “normative” disabling conditions, and “normative” generational traumas mobilized by colonial, fascist, theocratic, and imperialistic legacies.

Disability and Multilingualism A Global Perspective, 2021

Peer-Reviewed Journal Article, 2024

This paper explores the ways in which disability gets fetishized in the global context using the ... more This paper explores the ways in which disability gets fetishized in the global context using the case study of disabled war veterans in Iran who were injured during the Iran-Iraq war. Relying on a Disability Studies' lens, I analyze the ways in which the Iranian state after the Iran-Iraq war has “dealt” with its disabled veteran and civilian population. The paper argues that since the war ended in 1988, the Iranian state has engaged in what I call “fetishizing” the disability of its injured population, both veterans and civilians, in several ideological ways. Throughout this paper I indicate how the state has managed to use the disabled bodies of the injured survivors as a way to guarantee its survival by portraying them as an ideological construct called “living martyrs,” as opposed to disabled humans in need of physical and affective care. Additionally, the paper discusses how the injured survivors’ disability has too been fetishized in the global context during and after the war, as the world has remained silent in the face of violent chemical attacks on Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan.

Disabling Power of Class and Ideology: Analyzing War Injury through the Transnational Disability Theory and Praxis, 2019

My doctoral thesis, through a case study of the theocratic-nationalist politics of the Iranian re... more My doctoral thesis, through a case study of the theocratic-nationalist politics of the Iranian regime and the imperialist politics of the U.S., Russia, and Western Europe in the Middle East, investigated the ways in which gendered-, ideological-, and raced social-relations sustain armed conflicts and generate disability/injury. The study contributed to the emerging field of materialist/Marxist disability studies and critical race moves in disability studies by engaging the dialectics of geopolitics in order to contextualize war, and by proposing a new transnational theory for theorizing disability. In this paper, I extensively discuss my theoretical framework, along with the methodology for collecting and analyzing data in order to offer a radical alternative research method to traditionally biomedical, post-conventionist, liberal, and bourgeois approaches to disability. Additionally, I discuss how I built the new model using the case study in details while introducing its core theoretical constructs emerging directly from the case study. My conceptualization of a transnational theory/model interrogates the violence of the global political economy 1 in producing disablement on a global scale. Finally, I discuss possible directions for further development of the

Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies Vol. 2, No. 1, Kurdish Culture, Identity and Geopolitics: Toward Decolonization (Summer 2018), pp. 22-42, 2018

Over the past several years, we have been engaged in human-rights/disabilityrights activism and o... more Over the past several years, we have been engaged in human-rights/disabilityrights activism and organizing with disabled and/or traumatized survivors who have been victims of the state violence (e.g., war, incarceration, forced migration). As we interviewed them, documented their narratives, and/or read their prison memoirs, we re-lived our own past experiences with state violence as two racialized Middle Eastern women who have experienced political arrest in Turkey and Iran. Additionally, we realized that these experiences are common in disabled/traumatized political prisoners across cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities. Given our experiences, and being Disability Studies (DS) scholars, we have developed a new model/theory to approach disability and disablement (especially) in the global southern/”third world” contexts. We have named our approach Transnational Disability Model (TDM) and have talked about it elsewhere (Kazemi, 2017). DS is an interdisciplinary field, which engages with social justice issues concerning disabled people and their participation in society, but rarely engages with disabling processes/relations that render people disabled. From the onset, it is important to clarify two features relevant to the discussion on the prevailing state of DS. First, the biggest players right now in this field are social constructionist theorists (those affiliated with the approach known as the social model of disability) employing either a cultural or material lens. Second, currently the most disputed DS model is the medical theory/model. The social model of disability and many other dominant perspectives in the field oppose the medical model or any type of rehabilitation model as they consider them part of a “normalizing” ideology (Goodley 2013). On the other hand, racialized people in the global north are rarely the topic of discussion in dominant DS, never mind the marginalized racialized peoples in the global south such as Kurdish political prisoners. This paper is a politically-necessary intervention in dominant theorization of disability as a western and global north problem in order to transform it toward a more inclusive, transnational, and politicized approach to damaged/injured human body, disablement, and disability.

Whose Disability (Studies)? Defetishizing Disablement of the Iranian Survivors of the Iran-Iraq War by (Re)Telling their Resilient Narratives of Survival, 2019

Abstract: This article is part of a larger inquiry into the production of disabled bodies due to... more Abstract:
This article is part of a larger inquiry into the production of disabled bodies due to violence. I examine processes of disablement in the global south, namely Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan, by wars launched and nurtured by both the local nation-states in the Middle East as well as the global north - the United States, Russia, and Western Europe. Utilizing a dialectical and historical materialist approach, I studied the Iran-Iraq war, the longest war of the 20th century. I explore how the disablement of global southern bodies in imperialist and nationalist wars is persistently naturalized – that is, attributed to the natural state of affairs in those regions, with the inevitable consequence that they cannot be connected to the violence of ongoing global and regional imperialism. This paper briefly touches upon the theoretical framework and methodology utilized to conduct this research, as well as the “problem” of disability in Iran.Subsequently, it goes on to extensively discuss the living conditions of the surviving Iranian veterans and surviving civilians of the Iran-Iraq war told through their own resilient voices. The veterans’ narratives expose their post-war experiences, including poverty, unemployment, inadequate medical-care, lack of medication due to the U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, and the presence of a dysfunctional disability-measurement system employed by the Iranian state. As a survivor of this war myself, I invite the reader to bear witness to how the violence of imperialism and nationalism not only renders people disabled, but also fetishizes their disablement by masking/mystifying the socio-political and economic relations that mediate the violent processes that render people disabled. By focusing on the veterans’ actual living conditions, this paper seeks to defetishize disablement, shifting the narrative of disabled veterans and civilians from tales of terrorism, heroism, living martyrdom, and patriotism, towards recognition of disability of/in human beings in need of care and support.

This article is a summary of one part of a larger project, which studied war and the resulting pr... more This article is a summary of one part of a larger project, which studied war and the resulting production of disabled bodies, analyzed in a dialectical (i.e., not linear, oppositional, binary, idealist, or mechanical) and historical materialist framework. This article comprises a summarized report of one aspect of a case study and a new conceptualization of disability theory from a transnational perspective. The case study examines the social relations behind the production of disabled bodies in the Iran-Iraq war, in which chemical weapons of mass destruction were used. The second part of the article, using the case study report, develops an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist, and non-ideological (according to Marx's Consciousness Theory) model for understanding disability. 1 This study uses the global context of capitalist economy and the imperialist politics of the United States and Europe in the Middle East to understand how disabled bodies are generated through armed conflicts sustained by imperialist and nationalist social relations (always gendered, raced, and classed). This study engages * Sona is final year Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Adult Education and Community Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. For the past several years, Sona has been researching the living conditions of people (both veteran and civilian) who have become disabled as a result of wars in the Middle East, especially Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. As well, she has conducted extensive research on the historical incarceration of intellectuals, political dissidents, journalists, and community organizers in the post-revolution Iran. Additionally, she has worked and organized with Iranian and Kurdish political prison survivors and their families as a trauma counselor and political ally for the past five years. Her research, praxis, and activism focus on imperialism, nationalism, and the acquisition of disability due to violence. Sona's research investigates the nationalist and imperialist politics of nation-building in the Middle East to understand how disabled bodies are generated through wars and degenerative public-spaces, such as prison, sustained by ideological, gendered, raced, and classed social-relations. Sona's academic research informs and is informed by eight years of community teaching experience, such as teaching English to and social-justice organizing with the newly-arrived (often traumatized) Iranian, Kurdish, and Cuban immigrant and refugee women with mental health concerns. Her scholarship and praxis engage the dialectics of geopolitics, examine them in the context of incarceration and armed conflict, and understand internalized oppression from her standpoint, a war-survivor Middle Eastern woman's standpoint.

Madness as Response-Ability Against State Terror, 2022

https://rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1083/2395, 2021

Disability and Multilingualism, 2021

Disability and Multilingualism A Global Perspective, 2021

Peer-Reviewed Journal Article, 2024

Disabling Power of Class and Ideology: Analyzing War Injury through the Transnational Disability Theory and Praxis, 2019

Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies Vol. 2, No. 1, Kurdish Culture, Identity and Geopolitics: Toward Decolonization (Summer 2018), pp. 22-42, 2018

Whose Disability (Studies)? Defetishizing Disablement of the Iranian Survivors of the Iran-Iraq War by (Re)Telling their Resilient Narratives of Survival, 2019

This paper is a case study encompassing a student’s story in N.B., Canada. The student’s disabili... more This paper is a case study encompassing a student’s story in
N.B., Canada. The student’s disability once disclosed is confronted
with negative attitudes and contempt—leading to her
mental health discomfort with the educational system in general.
However, the narrative suggests an alternative approach
to disability, that in this case, has led to the student’s well-being
and academic thriving. The case study goes further by presenting
a case about a racialized student in the same school
that is negatively approached by the school officials on the
grounds of racial profiling/discrimination. The paper seeks to
find connections as to how the small bodies of the “other” can
be a threat to the White and able-bodied preference of the
educational system at a micro-scale, and the nation at the
macro scale. The paper suggests that a dialectic—as opposed
to correlational or cause-and-effect methodology—should be
adopted to untangle the ways in which disability and race
manifest themselves in the educational system’s attitudes toward
disabled and/or racialized students. This paper offers a
Critical Disability lens to seek an answer to why disabled students
are perceived as a threat to the body of our schools; and a
Critical Race Feminist theory to dismantle the “racialized othering”
of Black and Brown bodies in our educational system.

Review of Bonnie Burstow (2017), "The Other Mrs. Smith", 2019

In her new book, Psychiatry and The Business Of Madness, Bonnie Burstow raises a series of critic... more In her new book, Psychiatry and The Business Of Madness, Bonnie Burstow raises a series of critical questions for the future of psychiatry as a “legitimate” branch of medicine and as a capitalist industry designed to make profit: How has psychiatry managed to become globalized, and in the process, so completely naturalized that we forget to question its mere existence, never mind the ways in which it operates? How are we implicated in the process of physical and chemical incarcerations planned and implemented by the business of psychiatry?

While in today's academia, all we hear is apolitical and ahistorical feminist lens/identity from ... more While in today's academia, all we hear is apolitical and ahistorical feminist lens/identity from a 'local' and 'specific' cultural point of view; and material modes of production and consumption are discussed assuming that the women's emancipation will presumably occur when class hierarchy is abolished, this book—Marxism and Feminismbecomes conspicuous. Have Marxism and Feminism rejuvenates the Marxist reader while breathing new life into the dusty lungs of feminism. Shahrzad Mojab, in her new book Marxism and Feminism, once again emerges with a new revolutionary collection of thoughts, ideas, experiences that are the pure meaning of resistance against capitalism and patriarchy by Marxist and feminist struggles in theory and praxis. Shahrzad Mojab offers solutions by raising new questions/problems to tickle the belly of the beast in which capitalism and patriarchy are so internalized that we often forget how delicately we are preoccupied with (re)producing them (i.e., living patriarchal and capitalist social relations). Shahrzad Mojab, this time, brings to the table a strong collection of weeks, months, years perhaps decades of groundbreaking discussions between her and her prominent colleagues; and by doing so, she provides a universal access to these thoughts by presenting them to the ordinary reader who might not have access to the higher levels of academia due to poverty, precarious status, gender inequality and so on that are embedded in capitalist and patriarchal society. This book is a blatant declaration of combat against capitalist and patriarchal organization of human thinking and acting.

Human Rights on the Move, 2024

Barriers in the way of universal human rights, both as a notion and a legal framework, are multil... more Barriers in the way of universal human rights, both as a notion and a legal
framework, are multilayered and plenty, including lacking jurisdiction,
states' claims of sovereignty, and authoritarian states arguments for cultural
relativism as a rationale to justify crushing internal dissent. Although
largely discredited, the concept of cultural relativism and cultural relativist
arguments get mobilized and invoked by totalitarian regimes as a defense of
human rights violation. In this piece, through an autoethnographic account,
I focus on the appropriation of cultural relativism by the Islamic Republic of
Iran, a theocratic state, to hinder Iranians' access to universal human rights,
creating a "state of exception" (Agamben) and justifying the violence committed within the insurmountable walls of state sovereignty. I also demonstrate how the rationale they use to do so is sometimes tolerated, or even taken up, by educational institutions (albeit with good intentions) and their social circles to breed indifference regarding human rights violations in the non-Western contexts.

What does disability justice mean informally when taught and practiced individually, collectively... more What does disability justice mean informally when taught and practiced individually, collectively, and globally? We examine the possibility of taking stock of disability justice pedagogy from within communities and cross- cultural settings, while attending to the ways in which disability justice is negotiated as everyday aesthetics across cultures. We call the workings of
such everyday learnings concerning disability, Informal Disability Justice Pedagogy (IDJP). As scholar- activists, we are aware that ableist attitudes and binaries get animated differently across cultural settings. Take for example a seemingly unchangeable binary such as autonomy and collectivity. In the Western world, autonomy may signify a capacity to perform on one’s own in public and private spaces. In global Southern contexts, on the other hand, disability autonomy may signify finding a breathing space of one’s own from within interdependent social arrangements and collectives, and at the same time a will to foster the latter in favor of intersectional disability justice. We use a transnational approach to disability/ disablement/ injury to account for the diverse,
or often contradictory, politics of the social justice movements and disability justice initiatives in different geographical locations. We deploy a transnational lens to resist alienation of the global South and normalization of the global North, whiteness, and the West as the only focal point in disability studies

Madness as Response-Ability Against State Terror: A Case Study from Iranian Revolution, 2022

This book examines the disabling nature of exploitative social relations, class, and ideology in ... more This book examines the disabling nature of exploitative social relations, class, and ideology in four different case studies in the contexts of Iran, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Saudi Arabia. It explores the patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist, and theocratic social relations that produce and sustain disability/injury, and traces these relations by engaging the dialectics of local and global politics. What I have intended to do effectively in this book is to reclaim this space of body/mind studies, namely Disability Studies (DS), for an embodied Marxist Feminist theoretical framework that I bring to bear on ableist violence produced at the vortex of transnational capitalist-imperialist wars that proliferate disability in the oft ignored spaces of the global south.
This book uses the global context of class and ideology inherent within the capitalist economy and the global and regional imperialist politics of Russia, the United States, Western Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Iran to understand how disabled bodies are generated through gendered, raced, and classed violence of imperialist and theocratic social relations. This book has three main foci: a) bearing witness to injured/disabled survivors of war, incarceration, torture, punitive limb amputation, and acid attacks; b) the formulation and application of a Transnational Disability Theory and Praxis; and c) developing the conversation further in DS about the creation of disability by violence in the global south through four different case studies. This study contributes to DS by proposing and applying a new disability theory and praxis from a war-survivor Middle Eastern woman’s standpoint. This book project uses dialectical and historical materialism (DHM) as a theoretical framework and a tool of analysis to collect and interpret the data from the case studies. It then develops and proposes a model for a revolutionary understanding of disability/injury, contextualized within transnational, non-ideological, anti-imperialist, and class-conscious disability-activism.

The concept of mobile immobility serves as an invitation to further trouble disability studies di... more The concept of mobile immobility serves as an invitation to further trouble disability studies discourses on mobility and immobility. In this article, we theorize what im/mobility means in contexts of political incarceration and violent oppression in the Middle East, as numerous bodies are caught and injured by ableist barriers, borders, carceral institutions, walls and wars. Troubling ableist hierarchies that assume the superiority of mobility, we highlight the many ways that immobility is leveraged towards political mobilization, casting away any clear definitional boundary between
the concepts of mobility and immobility. Through a disability studies lens, we unpack mobile immobility by exploring three examples that demonstrate the complexity and nuance needed to theorize im/mobility. First, we enter through the case of a Kurdish political prisoner in 1980s Turkey who became disabled as a result of participating in a hunger strike and two death fasts during his incarceration. We then explore the genre of incarceration ecriture, detailing written and artistic creations produced by political prisoners and survivors in the Middle East, and drawing attention to how inmates mobilize their experiences of immobility towards transformative justice. Finally, we consider the category of kulbars, or illegal cross-border carriers that are at once both forced into mobility and immobility due to extreme poverty and lack of political and social recognition. Through each of these examples, we question what mobility and political mobilization mean in the contexts of state violence, surveillance, authoritarianism, austerity, and borders.