Speaker
Description
This work explores how Iranians in the diaspora make sense of their encounter with the 2025–2026 uprising and the subsequent massacre via eight in‑depth interviews, analysed via Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis within a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame. It positions these narratives in the context of human‑rights documentation of nationwide protests met with live fire, mass arrests, information blackouts, and constraints on mourning, arguing that the uprising and massacre form a continuous process rather than discrete events. The analysis traces how participants experience the massacre as a world‑reorienting Event that reorganises embodiment, temporality, and sociality, and how they struggle to name and quantify the violence through maximal signifiers, death counts, and haunting images of shrouded bodies and killed children. It identifies emergent ethical and identificatory formations, guarding the dead’s “legacy,” refusing symbolic impunity, and reconfiguring Iranian‑ness away from shame toward sacrifice, courage, and a long, sometimes mythic, horizon of equal rights.
| Institutional Affiliation | University of Manchester |
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