Summer Design Institute Lecture Series 2020
Ghazal Jafari discussed key topics from her ongoing initiative and book project, Rivers of Power, as well as selected projects and publications from OPEN SYSTEMS at the intersection of environmental justice, racialization of space, and shared struggle for self-determination.
Dr. Ghazal Jafari is a territorial scholar trained as an architect, urban designer, and cartographer. Her research focuses on territorial justice, racialized geographies, colonial histories, political infrastructures, feminist theories, immigrant narratives, and non-Western spatial discourses. Jafari is cofounder and director of OPEN SYSTEMS™ (OPSYS®), a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) research organization dedicated to environmental justice, spatial inequality, climate change, community self-determination, and sovereignty. Originally of Persian and Azeri descent, now living in the United States, Ghazal and her family left Iran in 2007 due to political and socio-environmental violence. Since then, she has been studying and documenting spatial complexities, transnational dimensions of racial and political power, systemic injustices, and deep-seated heteropatriarchy that prevail in former British colonial territories such as Canada, the US, and the Middle East. Her previous publications include “No Design on Stolen Land” (Jan/Feb 2020 AD Magazine), New Geographies 09: Posthuman (2018), Grounding UPS: An Ethnography of a Logistics Corporation (Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University, 2018), and The Missing 400: On the Omission of Women from the Urban Environment (2016-18).
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