CSRS Public Lecture Series
Exilic Meditations: Reflections on Displacement and the Impossibility of Return

Speaker: Peyman Vahabzadeh
Department of Sociology, UVic

Finding one's place on this globe of exiles requires deep reflection on origins, borders, horizons, cultures, and above all, the concept of home. We are all thrown into this life and can only make sense of it by reflecting on the place through which we make a claim to life. This saga is a collective one and can only be approached through a specific form of dialogue that disregards the sovereign’s regulative claim to hospitality as the generalized condition of humanity. The lecture will highlight some strange aspects of displacement through autobiographical and conceptual reflections.  

Peyman Vahabzadeh is an associate professor of sociology at University of Victoria. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books including Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements (2003); A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy and the Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979 (2010); Exilic Meditations: Essays on a Displaced Life (forthcoming); and six books in Persian. His essays, short stories, poems, memoirs and interviews have been published in English, Persian, German and Kurdish.  

This lecture is free and open to the public.