简介

As an urban scholar of globalization my scholarship is situated at the intersection of geography, planning, and feminist studies, using case study and ethnographic methodologies. A native of Iran, I did my undergraduate studies at the College of Fine Arts at the Tehran University. I graduated with a Master's degree in Architecture at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim and then completed my doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the years my research and teaching has spanned several countries including Chile, Mexico, Canada, Australia, South Africa, the United States and most recently Togo. In 2014 I was named as University Scholar, a prestigious award the University of Illinois bestows on its faculty for excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. My research interest concerns social aspects of urban development and planning. In this broad area, I am interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens' struggles to access dignified livelihood — namely how groups disadvantaged by class, gender, race and ethnicity access resources such as shelter, basic services and income. In the 1980s and 1990s I studied the global through the experience of local communities in Latin America; since the mid-1990s I have studied the global neoliberal policies through the experience of townships in post-apartheid South Africa. In my current project using a relational frame of analysis I seek to reveal the development connections and dependencies across seemingly far away communities located across the globe but intimately connected through everyday practices of their transnational families. My 2016 book Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking accounts for the relational developments processes that take place in Togo, Mexico and Illinois. My scholarship, the kind of questions I ask, the methodologies I use, and the insights I aspire to offer to the public are all greatly influenced by my activist past and drive for global justice. My teaching covers the following: planning theory, international and community development; socio-cultural formation of cities; grassroots strategies; migration and transnational urbanism; the reconfigured state-society relations for provision of basic services and housing; and a critique of the dominant global neoliberal policy framework. I also serve as the Director of the PhD program and the coordinator of the Transnational Planning Stream at DURP. Students who are interested to find out more about the PhD in Regional Planning or about Transnational Planning Stream and the International Programs and Activities at DURP should consult the respective websites and feel free to contact me for further information.