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.