Team

Chowra Makaremi – Principal Investigator (PI) of the ERC Off-Site

Chowra Makaremi is a tenured research scholar at CNRS in Paris (IRIS EHESS). Her research activity focuses on the anthropology of the State, everyday and legal forms of violence, and processes of subjectivation at the margins. It also reflects on the methods of knowledge production and dissemination. It explores the ethnography of the State in France (migrations, national frontiers and social boundaries), and the ethnography of violence in Iran (post-revolution experiences and legacies). More here.

Natalia Pashkeeva – Post-doc

Dr. Natalia Pashkeeva is a historian and archivist. She graduated from the Institute of History and Archives (IAI RGGU) in Moscow and holds a Master’s degree in Archives and Digital Humanities in History of the École Nationale des Chartes (ENC) in Paris. In 2018, she completed her doctoral degree at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), focusing on the activities of international organizations YMCA and WSCF within the former Russian Empire, the Russian diaspora in Europe after 1917, and the repressions in the USSR during the 1920s-1930s.

As a member of the OFF-SITE project team, Natalia explores the epistemological challenges related to the concept of “archival evidence” within the context of access restrictions to archives in authoritarian settings and investigates the influence of digital technologies on this dynamic.

Pardis Shafafi – Research associate

Dr Pardis Shafafi is an anthropologist specialising in political violence, legal anthropology and peoples´ tribunals, having completed her doctoral degree from the University of St Andrews in 2015 on these and other related themes. She has special expertise and interest on enduring victim-survivor pursuits for accountability and justice in contexts of impunity for powerful perpetuators. Dr Shafafi is the co-editor of the 2015 ‘States of impunity’ series for OpenDemocracy and co-editor and contributor to the upcoming 2019 special edition ’The Ethnography of Peoples’ Tribunals’ for PoLAR journal, writing on violation documentation efforts in the Syrian conflict. She is currently researching and writing on state practices of ‘enforced forgetting’ in the wake of systematic violence for a forthcoming Routledge Volume on these wider themes and acts as an elected convenor of the European Association of Anthropologists’ Applied Anthropology Network, alongside her role as senior researcher at Designit Oslo.

Omid Montazeri – Research associate

Omid Montazeri is an essayist, journalist, and former political prisoner. His main field of research is the intellectual and political legacy of communism and the left in Iran, with a particular focus on the period from the 1960s onwards, especially in relation to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Since 2018, he has been a broadcast journalist with the BBC. He co-wrote a documentary exploring the impact of the October Revolution on the Iranian left.

From 2021 to 2022, Omid was the BBC’s on-field correspondent during the trial of Hamid Nouri in Stockholm, covering one of the most significant legal cases related to the 1988 mass executions of Iranian political prisoners. His coverage resulted in the documentary Iran: Catching a Killer for BBC World.

Between 2019 and 2024, he worked with the ‘Off-site project’ as an advisor on state-building and violence in post-revolutionary Iran, as well as on counter-archiving efforts.

He studied law at Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran from 2004 to 2009. Following his arrest during the December 2009 protests, he faced a mass show trial and was subsequently expelled from university. From 2013 to 2018, he worked as a journalist for Radio Zamaneh, an independent Persian-language media organisation in exile, based in Amsterdam.

In addition to his journalism, Omid served on the board of directors for the The Association For Freedom Thought, a civil and non-profit organisation composed of scholars and researchers that organised webinars and conferences on philosophical and social studies (2016-2018).

Omid’s research continues to delve into the formation of the nation-state in post-revolutionary Iran and the fate of opposition groups.

Bahar Majdzadeh – Research associate

Bahar Majzadeh is an Iranian artist-researcher. After finishing a thesis in Art at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2019, she is now a Temporary Research and Teaching Assistant (ATER) at Aix-Marseille University. She’s following a « practice-based research » approach that implies a theorized practice. She makes use of multimedia tools, at the crossroads of the fine arts and digital arts. Her hybrid projects include radical cartography, drawings, photographic images, sound, volume and video. While in this interdisciplinary approach the creative process remains the main instrument, writing is apprehended as a research method. It aims to enrich our knowledge and understanding through a sensitive investigation.

Leila Ghalebani – Research associate

Dr. Leila Ghalebani is a driven and engaged Data Scientist with a strong computational background in Physical chemistry. Receiving funds from Sweden’s innovation agency VINNOVA for the project “Risk assessment of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia by NMR metabonomic” in 2009 was a reorientation for Leila’s scientific career towards data science. Leila applies Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in computational medicine to understand underlying molecular bases of complex diseases (such as different dementia types).

Leila also develops algorithms for ML and applies multi-variate data analysis for the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of mental health problems and behavioral health. She is interested in deploying cost-effective ML and AI-powered analytics in real-world data. She has successfully adopted ML models in collaboration with health professionals and other “Applied Science” partners. She presumes that widespread adoption of human-centered computation in the personal, social, ethical context, and human rights implications will improve life quality and wellbeing through AI-powered analytics, and digital solutions.

There is still a lack of an official international court for governmental crime and violation against ordinary citizens. As a social activist, Leila joined the movement for justice, initiated by the family members, former political prisoners, and survivors of mass execution, in an international people’s tribunal (Iran Tribunal, Hague 2012). Tribunal’s verdict was that Iran’s government committed a crime against humanity in 1980-1989. Now she applies her analytics expertise to visualize the data related to mass execution in that bloody decade. The preliminary results are promising for giving a visual overview of the data. Using a complete dataset based on compared data from different sources will create a trustable unique visual reference for the future. Gathering all existing lists in one is her main goal in collaboration with Off-site.

Shokoufeh Sakhi – Research associate

Dr. Shokoufeh Sakhi is currently a member of the Pathologies of Solitude research network, a project hosted at Queen Mary University, London. She has a doctorate in political science from York University.  Her dissertation, Ethics and the Subject of Resistance: Levinas, Foucault and Marx, is focused on the distinction between ‘ethical’ and ‘survival’ objectives, a distinction through which resistance and capitulation may be elucidated. She acted as Executive Committee Director (2013-2014) of the Iran Tribunal Foundation investigating the Iranian state’s crime against humanity in the 1980s. She also testified as an ex-political prisoner at the Iranian People’s Tribunal hearings held at The Hague (2012). Among many documentaries, she participated in The Tree That Remembers, an NFB documentary film on the experiences of Iranian political prisoners in the first decade after the 1979 revolution. Her most recent publications are “Ethical-Political Praxis: Social Justice and the Resistant Subject in Iran” in Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice: Palgrave 2017, and “A Taste of Mortadella” in Voices of a Massacre: Onewrold Publication 2021.

Arpita Das – Publishing advisor and counsellor /  Proofreader

Arpita Das is the Founder-Publisher of the indie publishing house based in New Delhi, Yoda Press. She is Visiting Faculty and a Senior Writing Fellow at Ashoka University, a Board Member of PublisHer (womeninpublishing.org) and the South Asia Series Editor at Melbourne University Publishing.

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE AND ADVISORS:

Marie Ladier-Fouladi

Marie Ladier-Fouladi is a sociodemographer and research director at CNRS/EHESS-CETOBaC. Her current research focuses on the populationist policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. By questioning the ideological and political logic that drives this new orientation of the Iranian state, she proposes to examine various projects set up for this purpose in order to shed light on the process of mutation of the political regime and its social consequences. Marie Ladier-Fouladi has published among others ‘Iran : un monde de paradoxes’ (Nantes, Atalante, 2009), ‘Iran, un reportage intellectuel 1978-2014’ in Vacarme, n° 68, summer 2014, and ‘La sécularisation en Iran sous la République islamique’ in Raison publique, June 2015.

Shahla Talebi

Shahla Talebi is assistant professor of religious studies, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University. Talebi’s research interests include questions of self sacrifice and martyrdom, violence, memory, trauma, death, burial, funerary rituals, commemoration and memorialization or their banning, religion, revolution, and nation-state in contemporary Iran. Talebi is the author of “Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran” by Stanford University Press.

Kamran Matin

Kamran Matin is senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex. His research focuses on the international historical sociology of the Middle East. He is the author of Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change (London: Rutledge, 2013) and co-editor of Historical Sociology and World History: Unnerve and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, forthcoming). He is co-convenor of the British International Studies Association working group on Historical Sociology in International Relations, and part of the management committee for the Centre for Advanced International Theory at Sussex.

Florence Clavaud

Florence Clavaud is a French National Heritage Curator (Conservatrice générale du patrimoine). She is Head of the National Archives Lab, Digital and Conservation Department, National Archives of France ; Member of the Jean-Mabillon Centre of the Ecole des Chartes (EA 3624) and Executive Member of the International Council on Archives Expert Group on Archival Description.