is a CNRS tenured researcher in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris.
She has worked on migration controls and border governance in Europe and, since 2011, has been working on the 1979 Iranian revolution, the genealogy of the Islamic Republic and the question of state violence, based on an ethnography of archives. She led the ERC research programme OFF-SITE: Violence, State formation and memory politics: An off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran. In 2019, she directed the movie ‘Hitch: An Iranian Story’ (Alter Ego, France, 78 min.). Her publications include: ‘Aziz’s Notebook at the Hearth of the Iranian Revolution’ (Gallimard, 2011/Yoda Press 2014); ‘Enghelab Street: A revolution through books 1979-83’ (Le Bal/Spector, 2019); Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of a revolutionary uprising in Iran (La Découverte 2023 / Yoda Press 2025).
What happens when societies become desensitized to violence? Does humanity collapse under the weight of repeatedly inflicted cruelty, witnessed as routine, forcing endurance on women, the poor and others excluded from citizenship, as in Gaza? Or does resistance rest in the gestation of fragmented, suspended lives, the martyred dead and movements like ‘Woman, Life Freedom’?