An off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran with Chowra Makaremi and Hamit Bozarslan

What should orient research agendas: data’s availability, or grey zones of knowledge that require clarification? As boundaries of empirical research are delineated by access to the field, even the most impartial research remains skewed towards practices of power, and particularly the topography of its impunity. But how to think about empirical knowledge beyond field investigation? Based on the case of Iran, this talk is an invitation to open new paths in the study of ‘locked’ societies, by adapting our methods and epistemology to the global circulation of norms, data and people. Through the anthropology of the State and violence, archive ethnography and the use of new technologies, it experiments trans-disciplinary methods in the production of empirical study "off-site", in order to fill a substantive gap in the history of the long the Iranian Revolution (1979-1989), and how its legacy reappears in todays’ revolutionary situation.