Canceled – Maryam Kashani

Maryam Kashani’s presentation, “Terrorist, Gang Member, Provocateur: Visuality and (Dis)placement in the Bay Area,” has been canceled. No further information is available at this time.

Description: In 2013 the city of Oakland, California, began plans to start the second phase of a Homeland Security-sponsored Domain Awareness Center aimed at intensifying and aggregating surveillance around the city. This talk and film performance considers how Muslims in coalition with activists, lawyers, and organizers, mobilized against this program articulating the effects of surveillance, gentrification, and policing on their families, communities, and the possibilities of political dissent.


Maryam Kashani is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Trained as an anthropologist and filmmaker, she is currently working on a book manuscript drawn from her ethnographic fieldwork and filmmaking at Zaytuna College and with Muslim communities of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her films and video works have been screened at festivals, museums, and universities internationally. Kashani’s areas of research include the following: Racial/ethnic/religious diasporas and transnational political movements; gender and sexuality; Islam and Muslim communities; visual anthropology, documentary, and experimental filmmaking; visual culture and the senses; knowledge, ethics, and power; and new media forms and methods.