Sara Tafakori

Position
Visiting Fellow
Office Phone
Office
2-S-10
Bio/Description

Bio

Sara Tafakori is an Assistant Professor in Critical Media Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research lies at the intersection of feminist and postcolonial theory, affect theory and media and cultural studies. Her work particularly explores the problematics of constructing feminist solidarity, with a focus on hybrid activist networks in Iran. She is interested in digital affective practices in (post)colonial contact zones and their role in creating new political spaces of appearance, alternative archives and revolutionary imaginaries.  Tafakori’s research has been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the Review of International Studies (RIS), Feminist Media Studies and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, among others. Her article for Signs, ‘Digital feminism beyond nativism and empire: affective territories of recognition and competing claims to suffering in Iranian women’s campaigns’ which explores affect theory to read political emotion through a non-Western lens and focuses on problematics of feminist resistance and solidarity in the global south received the 2021 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

Her work exploring melancholia and grief as sites of revolutionary intimacy and activist resources was the recipient of 2022 non-resident research grant fellowship from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Western Australia: this research was published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, in an article entitled  ‘Wild Intimacies: Justice-Seeking Mothers in Iran, Networked Activism and the Affective Politics of Mourning’. Tafakori’s research on digital activism and archives has also been supported by an in-residence fellowship from the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) at Ruhr University Bochum (2023). She is the co-recipient of a British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS) British Academy grant award in 2024-5 for the collaborative international research project 'Feminist solidarities, archives of hope and (im)possible futures'. She was also co-recipient of a 2020 European International Studies Association (EISA) Workshop Grant Award for excellence for the research proposal ‘Decolonizing Affective Attachments in Global Politics’. She is co-editor of the Brill Critical Emotion Studies book series, an interdisciplinary book series engaging with affect and emotion in the contexts of race, racism, and coloniality; gender and sexuality; indigenous politics; social movements; conflict, security, and changing technologies. 

Tafakori received her PhD in Middle Eastern Politics from the University of Manchester, UK. She has previously held Postdoctoral and Teaching Fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, the Max Weber Foundation, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).  She completed her MA in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and her BSc in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Tehran. She has a background in professional journalism, working as a columnist on national newspapers in Iran for a number of years.