Aytak
Dibavar
My name is آی تک دیباور / Aytak Dibavar (they/she) and I am an Iranian activist, artist, and an assistant professor of Gender and Social Justice at McMaster University, Canada. My work and research are entangled with feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist knowledge production as well as creative/art-based teaching practices. I research and write about race, gender, memory, political trauma, absence and silence.
Research
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at York University (Double Major: Gender Studies and International Relations).
My doctoral research provides a decolonial reading of silence through the pairing of Islamic Sufist traditions with postcolonial feminist International Relations (IR) literature in order to understand the effects that silence has on the transmission of political trauma intergenerationally.
My research examines silence as a form of language, rather than a lack or void in need of being captured or ratified. It explores untranslatability, rethinking how one can attend to that which refuses to be captured; the poetic ethnographic refusal of which does not fit into words.
I research and teach on/with gender, race, class and sexuality focussing on feminist, queer, postcolonial, decolonial, and anti-racist knowledge production.
Both my teaching and research attends to the above-mentioned intersections in investigating how contemporary racial and national formations exist in complex and intimate relationships with longer histories of settler/colonialism and imperialism.
My courses centre the work of feminist scholars and teachers whose work have been central in the development of my own pedagogical practice.
I journey with my own and others’ familial silences and in this way, I seek to understand how individuals' political identity (or their engagement with the political) have been shaped through the historical intersectional experiences of trauma and political oppression.
In order to explore the transmission of trauma in the private sphere, I engage with narrative approaches that provide access to the personal and lived experiences of survivors and their children. My study develops a theory of political trauma that understands the private sphere as a key vector for the transmission of identity in states where the essential artefacts of public life are tightly controlled.
My doctoral work was supported by the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Scholarship and SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. I also hold a SSHRC CGS-funded Master of Arts degree in International Relations from McMaster University and a Law degree from Azad University in Iran
Let’s Talk Silence & Nothingness
I research silences and absences.
Visible, communicable, uncategorizable silences, or absences that are beyond theorization. Loud, bold, messy, and untranslatable silences. Silences that have taught me how to resist more than any words or speeches. Absences caused by political violence, trauma, dislocation, forgotten memories, or maybe unforgotten, but unspeakable memories. Absences that are part of our everyday assemblages. As someone whose whole life has been molded and shaped by silence and absence, I’d like to understand what they are. What do they signify, and/or how do they work politically?
In my work I move through Islamic Sufism and a decolonial feminist reading of quantum physics to queer our understanding of concepts such as silence, absence, and nothingness. In many ways, what has historically been deemed “nothing” (nothing important, nothing relevant, nothing significant) has either been erased, violated, or colonized. The questions remain then: how can we be responsible to the silence of a space and its hauntings?
The challenge of researching these topics is that it requires us to look away from the tangible, documented world. How can we map the location of silence/ absence? How can we create a new method that moves beyond and challenges the conventional? And most importantly, how do we avoid categorizing or creating another mould while doing that? These and many more questions shape the basis of my research, where I explore methodologies that allow us to write silence and absence without writing them.
How can one be responsible to the silence of a space? How can one acknowledge its hauntings, phantoms, and colonial pasts if they are deemed irrelevant, invisible, void—reduced to nothingness?
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