COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
Crossing disciplinary silos, I am also troubled by the walls that separate academic and community knowledge. Starting with my 1996 UN collaborative publication I have continued my efforts to produce knowledge with and through collaborations that cross university-community boundaries. I collaborated with artist-scholar-activists to produce audiovisual and theatrical work to enhance the reach of my research beyond academia. I have also keenly sought collaboration opportunities with activists and academics in the US and abroad to co-produce knowledge about shared struggles of grassroots for a just and humane urbanism.
2024 - Present
Social Theater: Zan-Zendengi-Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom)
2022
This social theater brought a group of Iranian students and exile and the Inner Voice social theater director Lisa Fay, to inform a largely non-Iranian audience about the ongoing woman-centered revolutionary movement in Iran. We used creative work of social theater to share with the world the contagious courage of young women and men whose voices against oppression need to be heard worldwide. The cast of amateur actors developed the content for the play based on their own experiences and reflections on the past struggles and current events during the month-long creation of this play.
2022
This art exhibition brought together formerly incarcerated artists from different parts of the world including the US, Iran and island prisons located off Australian shores to share their experiences through art and art-based workshops. Curated and facilitated by Nasrin Navab and Sarah Ross, they engaged in intimate conversations and coproduced knowledge on how the economics, spatial planning, and logic of punishment shape our everyday lives, even if we have not had direct experience with police, courts, ICE agents, detention centers, jails, or prisons. I initiated this collaborative community-based art exhibition to further build transnational solidarities among people waging similar struggle against violence of incarceration and contributed my 2019 autobiographic video essay titled “Pieces” as my memoir of exile.
This ongoing project referred to in short as Humane Urbanisms Project (HUP) is a multi-sited knowledge co-production project led collaboratively by academics and activists in the US, South Africa and Brazil and supported by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Call to Action, at UIUC.
2018-2019
Project and e-book. Seeking relevance of my academic work beyond university settings, I retooled myself through Mellon Foundation's Training in Digital Methods in Humanities fellowship (TDMH 2018) to move beyond the exclusivity of textual knowledge and produce digital stories with activists as a more inclusive medium in knowledge co-production. With the support of the Publishing Without Walls initiative we produced and published the 2019 e-book collaboratively among activists and academics in multiple global locations participating in the broader Constructing Solidarities project.
2021
Participated in an hour-long documentary, Immigrants’ Journeys: Challenges and Opportunities in Champaign-Urbana, which aired on WILL-AM April 23rd and April 25th 2021.
2018-2019
In collaboration with urban activists in Chicago and South Africa and supported by the Mellon Foundation Humanities Without Wall we built an open access multi-media website Insurgent Midwest: Transnational Dialogues for a Humane Urbanism. In this project we aimed to build transnational solidarities among activists waging similar fight for housing justice but in distinct parts of the world. First, the dialogues were virtual and later in-person when Chicago-based and the Cape Town-based housing activists had a weeklong exchange in Chicago through site visits and closed workshops to safely discuss and exchange their strategies, co-produce knowledge, and develop solidarity across national boundaries for a humane urbanism. See various meetings and activities facilitated through this project here.
2016-2018
I worked with experimental artists at the School for Designing a Society to dramatize and convey through theater the main points of my research documented in the Global Heartland book. This was produced as Glo Heart: A Displaced Lullaby, a musical play traveling to small towns facing immigration tensions, central to both my book and the play. The play stirs conversation in audiences who otherwise may not read my book or talk about difficult issues, such as immigration experiences of their local community.
Frame from Moving Flesh. Dir: Sarah Ross and Ryan Griffis.
Moving Flesh: Act three of Between the Bottomlands and the World
2014-2015
This video production by digital artists Ryan Griffis (UIUC Art & Design) and Sarah Ross (Chicago Art Institute) dramatizes the experience of citizens and immigrant workers in Beardstown, Illinois, some of whom appear in my Global Heartland book. Griffith and Ross hired professional actors to read interview transcriptions and act as the old and new residents of this rapidly changing former Sundown town.