Part of the ESALA Frictions Public Lecture Series: https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/esala-public-lecture-series
The Plantation: Discipline of unruly waters, plants and peoples in Dez
Dr Samaneh Moafi
The industrial cultivation of sugarcane was first initiated on the
border of Iran and Iraq in the 1960s and was aided by the Dez Irrigation
Project. As a result, approximately one hundred villages and the
supporting network of water streams and qanats (underground channels)
were demolished. In their place thirteen new townships were built,
alongside an engineered network of new concrete canals and a dam.
Through a close reading of governmental documents, field reports,
anthropological accounts, memoirs, declassified satellite images and
archival photographs, this presentation sets out to provide an account
of the contemporary history of environmental violence in the region.
Dr Samaneh Moafi is a Senior Researcher at Forensic Architecture,
where she oversees the Center for Contemporary Nature. She has a PhD
from the Architectural Association (AA), with a thesis on Iran’s
contemporary history of state-initiated mass housing, emancipatory
practices of female residents, and the intersection of domesticity with
gender and class.