War, Sanctions and the Intimacy of Everyday Life

In this panel conversation, Negar Mottahedeh and Salar Mameni discuss themes of war, loss, sanctions and the possibility of love and intimacy with Iranians from the position of exile in the diaspora. 

Negar Mottahedeh will read a text titled “How My Instagram Hacker Changed My Life,” a tale that begins with the theft of her Instagram handle and follows the unlikely friendship that emerged between her, an Iranian professor in New York, and the young Iranian hacker who had everything to gain by selling the handle on the open market in Iran. Through thousands of exchanged messages, misunderstandings, and the fits and starts of digital recovery, the story traces the intimacies—and stark asymmetries—produced by revolution, uprising, war, sanctions, state power, and censorship. 

 Salar Mameni will read from his daily “notes” written since the ongoing war on Iran began on February 28, 2026. In these notes, Mameni contemplates the politics of witnessing war and aggression from the diaspora, the divisions amongst the Iranian community and the collectivities formed in times of loss and violence. The dispersed nature of the diaspora pulls together in these notes through texting, facetime and brief moments of connectivity with Iranians experiencing continuous internet outages and digital blackouts.

Negar Mottahedeh is a Professor of Literature; Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies; Professor in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies; and Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. This fall (2026), Dr. Negar Mottahedeh has joined Stanford's Iranian Studies Program to teach a new course titled Iranian Visionary: On 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Modernism (GLOBAL 140). Her book #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (Stanford University Press, 2015) examines the 2009 Iranian election protests and the emergence of social media as a platform for global political solidarity. The book traces how international activism around the #iranelection hashtag shaped the evolving online ecology of protest, anticipating practices such as hashtag activism, citizen journalism, avatar activism, and YouTube mashups. Her most recent book, Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2019; Persian translation, Naakojaa Press, 2026), draws on Kate Millett’s archival recordings from the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It recovers the history of the women’s demonstrations that followed the revolution and explores the voices, slogans, experiences, and political imaginaries captured in Millett’s “whisper tapes.” Through a playful, alphabetically structured account, the book examines the Iranian women’s movement and the complex encounter between Western feminism and revolutionary Iran.

Salar Mameni is an artist, art historian and associate professor of comparative ethnic studies and affiliated faculty in the history of art department at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), which received outstanding achievement in Media, Performance, and Visual Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2025 and honorable mention from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present in 2024. His second book Blood of Tulips is under contract with Duke University Press. Mameni’s essays have appeared in scholarly journals Representations, Qui Parle, Catalyst, Ramus, Resilience, Signs, Women & Performance, Critical Ethnic Studies, Visual Studies, Routledge Companion to Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change, and Al-Raida. His art criticism has been published in Canadian Art Journal, Fuse Magazine, and Fillip Review and in exhibition catalogues at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai, Mana gallery in Istanbul, and Sharjah Biennial. As an artist, Mameni has participated in numerous exhibitions with drawings in the collection of the Vancouver Art gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin art gallery in Vancouver and has delivered lecture performances at Human Resources in Los Angeles, ProArts Gallery in Oakland, Goldsmiths college in London, the Listening Academy in London, and the Hemispheric Institute held in Mexico City among others.