How to be in Solidarity with Iran: Feminist Anti-Imperialist Perspectives

Wednesday April 1st, 2026

5:00 - 7:00 pm E.S.T. 

Niloofar Golkar:A Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Justice Centre at Concordia University. She is a research coordinator with Research for the front lines. She is an activist, researcher, and writer who received her PhD from the Department of Politics at York University.She has been involved in Iranian feminist movement and continues to participate in environmental, and social-justice movements in Canada.

Aso Javaheri: A Kurdish historical sociologist, researcher, writer, activist, and international soccer referee from Eastern Kurdistan (Iranian). She earned the first PhD in sociology, working on a historical study on the political economy of soccer in Iran. Now, she is doing her second PhD (2023) at the History Department of Simon Fraser University. As an interdisciplinary woman researcher, her research interests reflect her background and include political economy, socio-political movements, revolution, class, gender, and the sociology of sports. She has presented and published work in various online and paper journals, books, and conferences in Farsi and English.

Shokoufeh Sakhi: An Iranian Canadian scholar-activist. In 1992, after spending 8 years in prisons, she arrived in Toronto as a political refugee. She thinks, writes and teaches on the politics and ethics of resistance, prison, justice and abolition. Dr. Sakhi's scholarly contributions include the chapter "Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry" in the book "Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration" (2015), where she examines imprisonment, the self, and the politics of memory. She has also participated in documentaries such as "The Tree That Remembers," an award-winning National Film Board of Canada production focusing on the experiences of Iranian political prisoners in the decade following the 1979 revolution.

Nastaran Saremy: An interdisciplinary researcher, critic, and instructor specializing in cultural and social analysis, aesthetics, and media studies. With a background in Philosophy and Aesthetics, she is currently a PhD candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Her research explores mass politics, social change, and the cultural-aesthetic composition of social praxis. In her doctoral work, she investigates memory regimes and mnemonic projects as methodological frameworks to trace how the legacies of the 1979 Revolution continue to shape, haunt, and inspire subsequent movements – particularly from marginalized perspectives.

Gita Hashemi, Moderator: A refugee from Iran, a transdisciplinary artist and curator in the "Dish with One Spoon" territory. Her recent projects include ‘rumi roaming: contemporary engagements and interventions’ (Guernica Editions, 2025), and Fugitive Transmissions (forthcoming 2027). She bought her first kaffiyeh in Tehran in 1979. She was the artistic director of Negotiations: From a Piece of Land to a Land of Peace (2003), a 10-day art event in Toronto that brought Palestinian and Indigenous artists together for conversations about settler colonialism. More recently, she helped bring Gaza Biennial to Toronto in 2025. She is a founder of Iran Solidarity Toronto/ایران سالیدریتی تورنتو, an anti-war/IRI/Zionist/monarchy collaboration of Iranians and non-Iranians in support of Iranian people’s movements. Her motto is "the personal is poetic, the poetic is political, the political is personal.”