GH-Lecture

Geographica Helvetica (GH), the Swiss journal of geography, publishes contributions in all fields of geography as well as in related neighboring disciplines. GH is a fully Open Access and multi-lingual journal, accepting articles in English, German, French, and Italian. It offers a platform for a geography that highlights relationality and difference, connections and disconnections within Europe and beyond. This agenda derives from the specificity of Swiss geography as a meeting ground for different geographical traditions and languages.

Insurrections in Iran: An off-site ethnography

Since September 2022, the Iranian society is engaged in a struggle that raises a question of concern to us all: that of the always opened possibility of revolt. I want to explore this question by combining two focuses, close and distant. The aim is, on the one hand, to understand the topicality of a revolt that is creating its own rythm and temporarilies, with surprise, with audacity, with uncertainty, and on the other hand, to unfold the long history and the social issues in which these uprisings resonate. While acknowledging the paradoxical distance from which we observe Iran (glued to the events, through the screens), I will put in perspective this spontaneous irruption in order to trace its multiple genealogies, but also to grasp the irrefutable revolutionary shift it represents, whatever future lays ahead.

Dr. Chowra Makaremi is a tenured researcher, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her research focuses on security, migration control, the anthropology of law and the state, and processes of subjectivation at the margins. She is the author of Le cahier d’Azi: Au cœur de la révolution iranienne (2011).