Faculty Highlight: Shourideh Molavi

Shourideh C. Molavi is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Shourideh is a writer and scholar specializing in critical state theory, decolonization, migration and border studies, decolonial ecologies, and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. She has over 15 years of academic and fieldwork experience in the Middle East—focusing on Israel/Palestine—on the topics of border practices, citizenship and statelessness, militarized landscapes, and human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence, and power.

In this interview, Shourideh shares more about her background, the classes she will teach in the Spring, life in New York City, and more.

I was trained as a scholar in political science and human rights, with a background in International Humanitarian Law, and have over two decades of extensive academic, legal research, and fieldwork experience in the Middle East, specifically in Palestine/Israel, on the topics of human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence and power. However, I’m not exactly pursuing a ‘career’ in human rights, and try to move away from this type of framing when it comes to my work. This is largely because the type of research and political interventions I made come in the form of projects that are activated across various fora: the university, courtrooms, the gallery and, most importantly for me, the community. It is also in this intellectual and practical vein that I try to direct my pedagogical approach in the classroom, orienting the participants in my classes towards taking up research that they too can see being activated in various fora in their respective spaces.

Alongside two core courses in human rights, one a senior seminar and one mainly on research methods, in this academic year I am also teaching ‘Refugees, Citizenship, Migration’ and ‘Borders, Surveillance, Rights—both original courses that I designed with extensive feedback from colleagues and former collaborators with whom I had worked across the dividing borders. The first of these courses, on Refugees, is one that I have taught in refugee camps in Palestine, as well as to students in Doha, Cairo and Basel in various moments in my previous teaching posts. In each new space, I try to tune the course to speak to the political needs, lived experiences and expectations of students, participants and their local context.

Working on human rights, and even chewing on the words is not easy. And the more you research and practice human rights with affected communities, the more you realize that human rights is more about declaring your existence and your dignity, than it is about recognition from a sovereign actor. At least in my experience, the most subversive and steadfast interventions by communities violated were ones that did not wait for nor direct their efforts towards recognition from State actors, but instead created facts for themselves on the ground. So my advice, if I have any, would be to try to not take the State sincerely. Having a positionality that is peripheral to units of politics that make up a State, and that agitates notions of borders, legitimacy and justice—among other ideas regularly projected as ‘stable’ or ‘stabilizing’—has proved more useful for me in thinking through human rights, than frameworks that begin and end with the State as a given. Keeping such thinking as your intellectual compass can help push you to mobilize different fora for action and organization around topics of human rights violations.

It’s a hard one, but I think one of the most crisp, unforgiving and vital texts on human rights is by Zahi Zalloua, titled Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek. I try to read it once each year.

Definitely the cultural exposure. I am Iranian, raised in Sweden, worked most of my life across the Middle East and North Africa, and various locations in continental Europe, and have a very young daughter, my sweet little monster, who is also culturally mixed. In this city, we are both relatively equally exposed to the various parts of our cultural identities that we were missing in the other places we lived before coming here. We are still new here, and trying to understand if the city is ‘liveable’ for us relative to our other base in Stockholm, Sweden. But despite the rough and sometimes shocking exchanges on its streets, I still feel that the cultural and community-centered life that we have built so far is what will keep us here. So, as long as our loved friends and colleagues stick around, then so will we.