Fataneh Farahani

The afterlives of migration: Integration, ordinary ethics and intimate citizenship (2023-2026)

In this recently funded project (by Swedish research council, VR) together with Yasmin Gunaratnam (at King’s College, University of London), we will examine the concept of integration through the narratives of those who are considered to be “integrated”. In doing so, our conceptual framing of integration recognises that what it means to be integrated is not necessarily a movement out of, or away from, xenophobic and racialising discourses. The study focuses on everyday dilemmas, narratives of belonging, well-being and pleasure. What does it mean to belong, on what terms, for how long? With what costs? And with what pleasures and joys? The aim of this qualitative project is to examine these questions through the experiences of those who are migrants and are of migrant heritage in Sweden and the UK. Drawing from the field of ordinary ethics (Das, 2013) and intimate citizenship (Plummer, 2003), we will investigate how dilemmas, conundrums and pleasures are experienced as points of vulnerability, responsibility and of belonging.

Gendering and Sexing Migration:

My doctoral thesis, Diasporic Narratives of Sexuality: Identity Formation among Iranian- Swedish women (2007), is a pioneering ethnographical account of sexuality among Iranian born women living in Sweden and was awarded the best dissertation in the Faculty of Humanities at Stockholm University. Gender, Sexuality and Diaspora (2018), published by Routledge in a completely revised version of my thesis. My postdoctoral research, Cultural and Racial Politics of Representation: A Study of Diasporic Masculinities among Iranian Men examines the under researched area of displaced masculinities through postcolonial, transnational and masculinities theories. Awareness of the importance of gender in migration studies has lengthy been addressed through women’ gendered and raced experiences. By studying male gendered experiences, I address a lacuna in current masculinities studies, which has tended to engage mainly with white men. 

Through methodological attention over my experiences as a diasporic researcher who works on displaced sexuality and diaspora, I have written about positionality and overlapping power relations in which the produced knowledge is embedded. 

Hospitality Studies

The project Cartographies of hospitality: The gendered, racialised, and classed politics of hosting investigates a less prominent side of global mobility; hospitality. Taking advantage of my Wallenberg fellowship, I have developed a cross-national research collaboration, focusing on the dynamics of hospitality and hostility to migrantised and refugee populations in Sweden, England, Turkey and Jordanian. Engaging with critical race and whiteness studies, the project shows how the hospitable practices of individuals and civil society organizations are instrumentalized in order to both overlook governmental hostilities and displace their historical and global accountability. 

Knowledge Production

The consistent conceptual thread running through all my work is the notion of home and belonging. The concept is not only is central in my work on the construction of diasporic femininities, masculinities and sexualities, it has also shaped my work on the concept of hospitality and who can be qualified as a host and who is considered and expected to act as a (grateful) guest. Due to this insistent engagement in the concept of home, I became interested in who feels ‘at home’ within the academy in general and within different scholarly communities? By examining how intersecting power relations shape the conceptualization and representation of produced knowledge and knowing subjects, in several writings on racialization and knowledge production, I show how the sense of epistemic entitlement establishes through racialised hierarchies within different academic settings.