Amin Moghadam’s latest publications

You can access our SpacePol team member Amin Moghadam latest publications below:

Moghadam, A. (2022). Migrants and their cultural world: When things teach us about lives. (external link)  In Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Refugee Studies (external link)  (pp. 255-263). Routledge.

Drawing on literature highlighting the ‘cultural turn’ in Migration Studies, this chapter will first analyse the debate on the culture-migration nexus through approaches developed in Anthropology and Cultural Geography. It will then explore the relationship between migration processes and materiality. This aspect of migrations, also dubbed the ‘material culture of migration’, analyses things produced, circulated, exchanged, and consumed in the migration context, as well as the production and transformation of migrants’ physical living spaces at different geographical levels. The chapter argues that studies of material culture of migration allow us, on the one hand, to complement or even go beyond identity-based discourses and, on the other, to consider the study of migration as a socio-cultural phenomenon that lets us to broaden our knowledge of the plurality of ways of being in the world with, and even beyond, the issue of migration.

Moghadam, A. (2021) The Making of a Cosmo-Nationalistic Trajectory: Iranian Cultural Entrepreneurs in Tehran and Dubai, Journal of Arabian Studies, 11:2, 243-261, DOI: 10.1080/21534764.2021.2198648

The art world is commonly seen as being conducive to the emergence of cosmopolitan spaces and sociabilities. However, this cosmopolitanism cannot be understood without observing the specific characteristics of the field of art and the socio-political context in which it emerges. This article examines how the internationalization and diversification of actors involved in the art scene in Tehran, reconfigures power relations and creates new relationships of interdependence, alignment or domination between actors from diverse social and geographical backgrounds. The focus is on the connections between Dubai and Tehran forged through artistic practices, via the analysis of a key actor: the “cultural entrepreneur”. In this sense, cosmopolitanism is considered both through the individual trajectory of the cultural entrepreneur, strongly anchored in the Iranian national context, and as a characteristic of urban spaces and sociabilities generated by artistic dynamics.