Ghazal Jafari

Education

Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Doctor of Design (DDes), Master in Design Studies (MDes in urbanism, landscape, & ecology); University of Toronto, Master of Urban Design (MUD); Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Bachelor of Architecture (BArch)

Biography

Dr. Ghazal Jafari is an award-winning designer, spatial historian, and territorial scholar in exile, originally trained as an architect and urban planner. Her research focuses on spatial and environmental justice, racialized geographies, infrastructures of domination, feminist theories, immigrant narratives, and non-Western spatial discourses. Originally of Persian and Azeri descent and currently living in the United States, Dr. Jafari left Iran due to political and socio-environmental violence and have since been documenting the complex, multi-dimensional, and transnational facets of systemic dispossession and heteropatriarchy that prevail in the Afro-Asiatic regions (’Middle East’) and the Americas, whose underlying code of supremacy is entrenched in territorial and infrastructural violence against peoples and the Land. She is the founding director of Miyān Rudān/ميان‌ رودان (’Between Rivers’ in Farsi), a territorial initiative based in the river crossing the borderlands of Iran and Iraq. As part of this initiative, her coming book concentrates on clashing histories of sanctions, systemic dispossessions, and tribal, Indigenous, feminist methods of transgression inscribed in landscapes between rivers, where resurgent ecologies emerge as a blueprint for refusal, trans-generational resistance, cultural identity, and political self-determination. Methodologically, her work is invested in creative countermaps and counternarratives in multimedia format, with attention to time-tested, situated, sensorial knowledge of landscapes. Dr. Jafari is a founding director of OPEN SYSTEMS / Landscape Infrastructure Lab, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to opening the knowledge of complex ecological challenges and raising awareness about geopolitical conflicts at the intersection of environmental justice, spatial inequality, climate adaptation, and community self-determination. Her recent projects and publications include A BOTANY OF VIOLENCE: Across 529 Years of Resistance & Resurgence (Goff books, 2021), NOT YOUR AMAZON TO EXPLOIT (2019-2021), “NO DESIGN ON STOLEN LAND: Dismantling Design’s Dehumanizing White Supremacy” Architectural Design 90 (2020), CONFRONTING COLUMBUS (2019-20), THE MISSING 400: On the Erasure of Women from the Urban Environment (2016-18), and NEW GEOGRAPHIES 09: Posthuman (2016-18).