In the organizer's words:

Listening: not as an abstract analysis, but as a shaped experience, anchored in bodies, lists, songs and burned archives. Whoever listens enters a field of practice and resistance, of experiencing and thinking at the same time.

Fatemeh Karimi tells the story of the women in Komala - a left-wing Kurdish movement that emerged in Iran in the 1970s - not as a heroic narrative of uniforms, but as a complex practice in which fighting, caring, organizing and theorizing coincided. The fighters of Komala were pioneers of a form of political participation that recognized women as fully valid subjects of resistance and thus established early forms of female political practice. Her work situates Komala in the political context of the 1979 revolution and its consequences - as a chapter that makes visible the need for critical reflection on gender relations in Iran and Kurdistan.

Somayeh Rostampour takes us to a different but related place: the think tank of jineolojî, the Kurdish "science of women" that emerges from the practice of democratic self-governance and female organization. Jineolojî is less a closed theoretical structure than an open field in the making - an attempt to decolonize knowledge, question hierarchies and create an epistemic vocabulary for life and care. At the same time, it remains controversial: Rostampour shows the tensions between academic critique and jineological practices, the question of legitimacy and the limits of a theory that has emerged from the struggles themselves. Both confront us with the radicality of the factual: that women in armed movements did not act as appendages to political processes, but as creators of knowledge about bodies, mobility, care work and collective organization. This knowledge is not a theorem; it is material: protocols, songs, decision-making processes, mourning lists.

For us here, in a small, vulnerable space of exchange, this means: translate carefully, not to explain, but to preserve. Feminist knowledge as a living practice - historically anchored and currently effective. A remembering that names and keeps open. A knowledge that is both resistance and theory.

Text: Maryam Palizban

This panel brings together three researchers who deal with the intertwining of gender, power and resistance in Iran and Kurdistan. At the center

are the books Women of Komala: Gender and Revolution in Iranian Kurdistan by Fatemeh Karimi (English edition 2025) and Femmes en armes, savoirs en révolte: Du militantisme kurde à la jineolojî by Somayeh Rostampour (French edition 2025).

Together with Firoozeh Farvardin, the participants will discuss how academic work can become a site of resistance: against forgetting, against political and epistemic violence. The panel invites participants to explore the space between theory and experience, between political thinking and lived history: as voice and knowledge in the uprising.

Fatemeh Karimi is an activist and Kurdish researcher from Iran. She holds a PhD in sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Since 2007, she has devoted herself to researching Kurdish women in Iran, particularly at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. She has published her research findings in Farsi, French and English, including on female genital mutilation (2010), polygamy (2014) and political participation of Kurdish women in the 1980s (2022/2025). In addition to her research, she also works as a social worker.

Somayeh Rostampour is a feminist researcher and PhD sociologist at the University of Paris 8. She specializes in social movements, gender issues and minority rights with a particular focus on Kurdistan, Turkey and Iran. Her research examines the development and dissemination of theories and practices in feminist and revolutionary contexts in the Global South, particularly in the Middle East. She published her book Women in Arms, Knowledge in Revolt in 2025 and has worked as a university lecturer and feminist Kurdish activist in recent years.

Firoozeh Farvardin is a sociologist and researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, specializing in politics and gender in the context of authoritarian neoliberalism. Her dissertation at the Humboldt University of Berlin examined the transformation of state and family politics in modern Iran. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and part of the Middle East Research Group (MERGE) at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM). Her work combines theoretical acuity with a deep engagement with bodies, gender and resistance in the Global South.

Panel: English language

Part of the program by:
3 DAYS TO LIBERATION II
(statement and program)
December 12-14, 2025
Conceived & curated by Maryam Palizban
Presented by CONSTANZA MACRAS / DORKY PARK

With: Fatemeh Karimi, Somayeh Rostampour
Moderation: Firoozeh Farvardin