The WGST faculty are pleased to welcome Dr. A. Marie Ranjbar as our newest assistant professor! Ranjbar's work integrates feminist political geography with scholarship on critical human rights, environmental justice, and decolonial and postcolonial feminist theory. She received her doctorate from Penn State University in the fields of Geography and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Ranjbar is currently teaching the course Who Runs the World? Sex, Power and Gender in Geography, which focuses on how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, ability, religion, ethnicity, and geopolitical location to structure the lived experiences of women across the globe, and applies critical geographic perspectives to gender inequality.
Ranjbar's research interests include examining the evolving relationships between social justice movements, international institutions, and global civil society in Iran, and also in studying how economic sanctions – which are often justified through the language of human rights – can limit the space of political speech and paradoxically worsen human rights conditions in Iran. Her current research examines the political conditions that make it challenging for Iranian citizens to speak openly about human rights and how activists strategically frame rights narratives as a means of political mobilization, both locally and transnationally. Her latest article, "Coming of age in a straight white man's geography: reflections on positionality and relationality as feminist anti-oppressive praxis" was published in the December 2021 issue of Gender, Place and Culture: a journal of feminist geography.
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Ranjbar into our WGST community, and for the future of her research, teaching and mentorship that she brings to our department!