In Revolution of Things (Princeton University Press 2023), Kusha Sefat tells the story of political transformations in post-revolutionary Iran from the vantage point of the relationships between materiality and language. 

Drawing on twenty-five months of fieldwork in Iran, Kusha shows how the different confluences of the material and linguistic worlds have brought about qualitatively distinct social fields in Tehran, with each constellation affording and foreclosing unique possibilities for political action. The point here is not to alter historical facts about Iran but to show how we can rethink the matter of those facts. It is an attempt to recover the possibilities that our dominant analytical and historiographical forms have stifled and to prepare ourselves for the possibility of a new critical scheme with which to scrutinise the present.  

Meet the speakers:

Dr Kusha Sefat (@KushaSefat) is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Tehran. His research writes material forms and flows into our histories of power by rethinking the matter of revolution, nature, domination, war, temporality, and class in the global south. Kusha publishes in English and Persian and sits on the editorial boards of several journals, including Cultural Sociology.     

Dr James Caron is a a transdisciplinary scholar of the Islamic world since the early modern period to now. His research work involves poetry, history, and religion.