Performance & Place-making: Collaborative Media Production with Displaced Youth in Iran

A talk by Dr. Nat Nesvaderani

Monday October 20th @ 12:30 PM

Location: Peterson Hall 108

Presented by McGill University's Anthropology Speaker Series

Co-Presented by the Institute for the Study of International Development McGill (ISID)

Synsopsis:

Pt. 1: Performance & Place-making: Collaborative Media Production with Displaced Youth in Iran

Affective representations of migrant and refugee youth have the power to mobilize fiscal donorship, create new policies, and impact institutional change. These images can also inadvertently reinforce fictions of the state. Iranian social documentary filmmakers (filmsazhaye ejtema’i) create in collaboration with NGOs and displaced youth as a part of their social justice work. At other times, the demands of “impact production” in the global film industry have led to uncomfortable alignments with state politics. This talk grapples with the politics of how images of displaced youth are produced and circulated, drawing from fieldwork in Iran with NGOs serving youth who self-identify as Afghan and Kurdish. Through ethnographic film analysis and collaborative media production, this talk centers displaced youth’s sensibilities of belonging and emplacement through the images and stories produced by youth themselves.

Pt. 2: Feminist Soundwork: “Academic Freedom”

A final part of this talk discusses “Academic Freedom” (11 min, 2025), a sound work that explores embodied listening across places and struggles in solidarity with Palestine. Drawing on sound recorded in Quebec City, global activist sounds shared on social media, and anonymized interviews with pre-tenure activist professors, the piece weaves together feminist listening with sound production practices. Through editing, it emphasizes repetition, dissonance, and persistence, amplifying the interconnected organizing on university campuses against erasure and silence.

Bio:

Dr. Nat Nesvaderani (she/they) is an Iranian-American educator, artist and anthropologist. With a PhD from Cornell University and a BA from UC San Diego, Nat is currently an Assistant Professor and Director of the Multimodal Anthropology Lab at Laval University, Quebec. Nat carried out fieldwork and participatory filmmaking projects with NGO schools serving working and displaced youth in Iran, using feminist and collaborative methods. They are committed to building community among radical media-makers as a founding member of two collectives: the EthnoCine Collective for intersectional feminist ethnographic filmmaking and CoMMPCT, the Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators and Teachers.