Sona is a postdoctoral researcher with the Society of Fellows: Human Rights, Pasts, Presents and Futures, funded by the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme (GAHDT) at the Ohio State University (OSU). From Aug 2020 to Aug 2021, Sona was a Project Coordinator and co-PI for a community-engaged research project, “The Recovery Project: Actions of Survival, Archives of Resilience” funded by GAHDT at OSU. Simultaneously, from September 2020 to April 2021, she was Research Justice at the Intersections Fellow at Mills College in Oakland, California. Previously, from 2018 to 2020, she held the position of Postdoctoral Researcher in Disability Studies, Medical Humanities, and Global Migration in the Department of English and Mershon Center for International Security Studies at OSU.
Sona’s research program is located in contradictions among transnational Human and Disability Rights frameworks and peace education “efforts” in the context of global and regional imperialism(s) in the Middle East region. Her postdoctoral project concerns traumatized Yazidi refugee women in diaspora and their disability and feminist consciousness as survivors of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the mental health of Iranian and Kurdish refugees in the US who are the survivors of state violence, Iranian women survivors of acid attack and their disability- and feminist consciousness, and punitive limb amputation in Saudi Arabia and Iran. At OSU, Sona teach graduate seminars and undergraduate courses in “Global Inequality and Migration,” “Global Human Rights,” “Disability Experience in the Contemporary World: Political Economy, Geopolitics, and Race” and “Introduction to Social Justice Education”.
In February 2018, Sona defended her Ph.D. thesis in Adult Education and Community Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. For the past several years, Sona has been researching the living conditions of people (both veteran and civilian) who have become disabled as a result of wars in the Middle East, especially Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. As well, she has conducted extensive research on the historical incarceration of intellectuals, political dissidents, journalists, and community organizers in the post-revolution Iran. Additionally, she has worked and organized with Iranian political prison survivors and their families as a trauma counselor and political ally for the past five years.Her research, praxis, and activism focus on imperialism, nationalism, and the acquisition of disability due to violence. Sona’s research investigates the nationalist and imperialist politics of nation-building in the Middle East to understand how disabled bodies are generated through wars and degenerative public-spaces, such as prison, sustained by ideological, gendered, raced, and classed social-relations. Sona’s academic research informs and is informed by eight years of community teaching experience, such as teaching English to and social-justice organizing with the newly-arrived (often traumatized) Iranian, Kurdish, and Cuban immigrant and refugee women with mental health concerns.Her scholarship and praxis engage the dialectics of geopolitics, examine them in the context of incarceration and armed conflict, and understand internalized oppression from her standpoint, a war-survivor Middle Eastern woman’s standpoint.
Sona Kazemi, PhD 