Author: Ghorbani Hajar

Hajar Ghorbani is an Iranian scholar and pioneer in the field of death studies in Iran. She is an esteemed anthropologist and the founder of death studies in Iran. Hajar serves as the Iranian ambassador to the Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS). She has been recognized with prestigious awards in Canada, including the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship at the University of Alberta and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, where she ranked first nationally. Hajar has published several influential papers and chapters on the study of death and dying in Iran and is the editor of the first volume dedicated to the social studies of death in Iran.

Digital Mourning and the Afterlife of Political Death

This mixed-media work was created in response to the people killed during the January 2026 violence in Iran and to the ways images of their bodies, names, numbers, and traces circulated through digital space. The work begins from the disturbing presence of black body covers, anonymous numbers, and fragmented images shared online. These images did not remain only as documentation of death. As they moved across social media, they became part of a collective struggle over recognition, grief, and political truth.

In this work, black plastic, staples, grey texture, stains, and repeated body-like forms are used to think through the material and digital life of suppressed bodies. The black plastic refers to covering, containment, disposal, and the forced reduction of the body to an anonymous object. The staples suggest both attachment and violence: they hold the forms in place, but they also pierce, fix, and immobilize them. The grey ground evokes a damaged surface: a wall, a floor, a public site, or an unstable archive on which traces of death are registered.

The number 1178 is not treated simply as a label. It stands for the bureaucratic and visual transformation of a dead body into a countable, searchable, and shareable sign. In the digital circulation of violence, numbers can both erase and preserve. They can reduce a life to data, but they can also become a point around which grief, anger, and public memory gather. The number becomes a fragile index of a person whose name, body, and story may be withheld, obscured, or violently managed.

This work is also an attempt to think about social media as a contemporary mourning space. In the aftermath of political violence, images of the dead often move faster than official recognition. Families, witnesses, activists, and ordinary users circulate fragments: a body, a number, a name, a post, a screenshot, a voice, a caption. These fragments produce a different kind of public archive—unstable, emotional, vulnerable, and collectively assembled. Digital circulation becomes one of the ways through which the dead continue to make claims on the living.

As part of my broader research on the agency of dead bodies and political mourning in Iran, this piece explores how suppressed bodies enter public life after death through both material and digital forms. The work does not attempt to reproduce the original images directly. Instead, it translates their force into texture, repetition, fixation, and surface. It asks how a body becomes a number, how a number becomes evidence, and how evidence becomes a site of mourning and resistance.

At the intersection of anthropology and mixed-media art, this piece treats visual material not only as documentation, but as a way of thinking. Through plastic, metal, texture, and number, it examines how political death is hidden, circulated, counted, and remembered.

January 2026 / Iran
Mixed-media response to political death and digital circulation
Black plastic, staples, acrylic, texture, stains, and numbered forms on canvas

Art, Anthropology, and Infrastructures of Martyrdom

This series is based on photographs I took during my fieldwork in Iran in fall 2024 and spring 2025, in the cities of Ahvaz and Tehran. The photographs document urban spaces, walls, official signs, memorial frames, inscriptions, and sections of cemeteries, especially the martyrs’ sections.

This project is part of an ongoing attempt to bring together anthropology and visual art in order to think more carefully about political death in Iran. It is not only a finished visual series, but also a process of learning how to work with images, materials, and mixed-media techniques as part of anthropological research. Through this process, I am experimenting with how field photographs can be transformed into visual objects that carry texture, damage, repetition, inscription, and material presence.

As an anthropological project, the series approaches these images as part of a wider field of social and political life: cemeteries, city walls, portraits, flags, inscriptions, frames, ritual objects, and public memorial infrastructures. As a mixed-media art project, it works with the photographs as material fragments, layering them with texture, thread, fabric, stains, marks, paper, and written signs. The aim is not simply to illustrate death, but to explore how death is mediated, framed, touched, repeated, and made meaningful through visual and material forms.

In these images, the martyr’s body is not present only in the grave or in the portrait. Its presence extends through architecture, walls, frames, inscriptions, plaques, flags, and urban infrastructures. The city becomes a surface for preserving, repeating, and reproducing the name and image of the martyr. The cemetery, likewise, is not simply a place of burial; it is part of a visual, material, and political system that keeps the killed body within public memory.

This series is also concerned with the role of visual culture in how people come to understand political death. In Iran, martyrdom is not only a religious or political category; it is also a visual language. It is encountered through posters, murals, framed portraits, cemetery layouts, public signs, ritual objects, and repeated inscriptions. These visual forms teach people how to see the dead, how to remember them, and how to place them within larger narratives of sacrifice, legitimacy, nation, and political belonging.

By combining field photography with mixed-media interventions, this work asks what happens when ethnographic images are not treated only as documents, but also as materials to be worked through. The added textures, stitches, stains, and fragments do not attempt to reconstruct reality. Rather, they make visible the processes through which death becomes public, political, and aesthetically organized. They also allow me to think through the body, the image, and the city in ways that writing alone may not fully capture.

At the intersection of art and anthropology, this series asks how visual forms shape the social life of the dead. It treats images not only as evidence, but as active sites of interpretation and experimentation. Through this work, I am trying to understand how political death is displayed, governed, mourned, aestheticized, and made meaningful in contemporary Iran—and how visual art can open another way of thinking anthropologically about death, memory, and public life.

Fall 2024 / Spring 2025
Ahvaz and Tehran, Iran
Urban spaces, walls, memorial images, and martyrs’ cemetery sections

Fieldwork: Overview

Fieldwork: Overview

My doctoral research is based on long-term ethnographic engagement with death, mourning, cemeteries, martyrdom, political violence, and material culture in Iran. In 2024, I conducted a multi-sited fieldwork project across several regions of the country, moving between borderlands, urban centres, cemeteries, museums, ritual sites, villages, war landscapes, and spaces shaped by political mourning.

This fieldwork included research in Arab Khuzestan, Kermanshah, Kurdistan, West Azerbaijan, Baluchistan, Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Shahin Shahr. Across these sites, I examined how death is mourned, governed, ritualized, remembered, and politicized through bodies, graves, laments, music, images, objects, ceremonies, and public space.

A major part of this research focused on local and vernacular mourning practices, especially women’s lamentation, Lur and Kurdish mourning traditions, Hurreh/Horeh singing in Kermanshah, Balochi lamentation and music, and forms of grief that circulate outside official institutions. I was especially interested in how women participate in mourning as ritual actors, narrators, singers, memory-keepers, and political subjects.

At the same time, I conducted fieldwork in more official and institutional sites of death, including Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran, museums related to death and martyrdom, national and religious ceremonies, 22 Bahman commemorations, and funerary events for unknown martyrs. This allowed me to compare local, familial, and vernacular forms of mourning with state-organized, ideological, and institutional forms of death management.

Together, these field sites form the empirical foundation of my doctoral project on the social and political agency of dead bodies in contemporary Iran. They allow me to trace how the dead continue to act through ritual, material culture, gendered mourning, burial spaces, public memory, and political contestation.

Book Chapter: Governing the Dead’s Territory

Book Chapter: Governing the Dead’s Territory

The Politicization of Death in Iran
Hajar Ghorbani
Published in Death and Institutions: Processes, Places and Past
Bristol University Press / Policy Press, 2025

Governing the Dead’s Territory: The Politicization of Death in Iran examines Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery as a major institutional space where death, burial, urban management, religious nationalism, and state power intersect in post-revolutionary Iran. The chapter asks how a cemetery can become more than a site of burial and mourning: how it can function as a governed territory through which the dead are classified, commemorated, organized, and incorporated into broader political narratives.

The chapter focuses on the transformation of Behesht-e Zahra into a large-scale municipal, ritual, and political institution. It considers how cemetery space, bureaucratic management, burial practices, martyrs’ sections, official ceremonies, and public memory contribute to the politicization of death in contemporary Iran.

This chapter is part of my broader research on death, mourning, material culture, political violence, and the social agency of dead bodies. It reflects my interest in how dead bodies and burial spaces continue to shape public life after death, generating forms of memory, obligation, legitimacy, and political meaning.

Publication Details

Chapter: “Governing the Dead’s Territory: The Politicization of Death in Iran”
Author: Hajar Ghorbani
Book: Death and Institutions: Processes, Places and Past
Editors: Kate Woodthorpe, Helen Frisby, and Bethan Michael-Fox
Publisher: Bristol University Press / Policy Press
Publication date: February 28, 2025

Read the chapter / View publisher page:

Social Studies of Death in Iran

Social Studies of Death in Iran

Edited by Hajar Ghorbani
Anthropology Publication, 2021
Original Persian title: Motāleʿāt-e Ejtemāʿi-ye Marg: Jostārhāyi Darbāb-e Marg dar Farhang va Jāmeʿeh-ye Irāni
Persian title: مطالعات اجتماعی مرگ: جستارهایی درباب مرگ در فرهنگ و جامعه ایرانی

Social Studies of Death in Iran is an edited volume in Persian, published by Anthropology Publication in 2021. The book brings together a group of scholars and writers to examine death, dying, mourning, burial, sacred death, medicalization, memory, art, literature, and cemetery spaces in Iranian society.

The volume was developed at a time when death studies had not yet been established as a recognized interdisciplinary field in Iran. Although death has long occupied a central place in Iranian religious, political, literary, and cultural life, it had rarely been approached as a sustained field of social inquiry. This book was therefore conceived as an attempt to open a space for interdisciplinary conversation around death and dying in Iran.

The book approaches death not as a merely biological event, but as a social, cultural, political, and material phenomenon. It asks how death is managed, symbolized, ritualized, medicalized, represented, and governed in Iranian society. It also considers how different historical periods, religious traditions, political transformations, urban institutions, medical systems, artistic forms, and literary representations have shaped the ways Iranians encounter death and mourning.

The volume is organized around several major themes: the social history of death, changing meanings of death, the medicalization of death, sacred death and martyrdom, representations of death in art and literature, and the emergence of large-scale cemetery spaces in Iran. Through these themes, the book introduces death as an interdisciplinary object of study and brings together perspectives from anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, medicine, psychology, literature, art, and cultural studies.

A central concern of the volume is the place of death in modern and post-revolutionary Iran. The book examines how processes such as urbanization, state formation, medicalization, war, martyrdom, cemetery management, and the institutional organization of burial have transformed the social experience of death. In this sense, the volume does not treat death as a private or marginal matter. It shows how death is embedded in public life, political authority, religious meaning, family relations, urban space, and collective memory.

The section on sacred death and martyrdom is especially important for understanding the relationship between death and political life in Iran. The book situates martyrdom, war death, memorialization, and cemetery organization within the broader history of the post-revolutionary state. It pays attention to how the Iran-Iraq War, martyrs’ graves, funeral ceremonies, memorial policies, and cemetery landscapes have contributed to the political and cultural organization of death in contemporary Iran.

The volume also engages with the visual and material dimensions of death. Tombstones, cemeteries, memorial forms, artistic representations, literary images, and funerary spaces are treated as important sites through which death becomes visible and meaningful. This attention to material and visual culture connects the book to broader questions that continue to shape my own research: how the dead remain socially present, how material forms organize memory, and how bodies, graves, images, and objects participate in the making of social and political worlds.

For me, editing this volume was an important early step in developing death studies in relation to Iranian society. It brought together scholars from different disciplines and created a platform for thinking about death beyond a single theoretical or disciplinary framework. The project also shaped the trajectory of my later doctoral research on the agency of dead bodies, political mourning, martyrdom, cemeteries, and the politics of death in contemporary Iran.

Decolonising Death Studies

Decolonising Death Studies

Edited by Panagiotis Pentaris, Stacey Pitsillides, and Hajar Ghorbani
Routledge, 2026

Decolonising Death Studies brings together international and interdisciplinary perspectives that rethink death studies beyond primarily Western frameworks. The volume foregrounds decolonial, situated, and globally diverse approaches to death, dying, mourning, ritual, care, and end-of-life knowledge.

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2020 Female Student Bursary Award; CFUW Edmonton

2020 Female Student Bursary Award; CFUW Edmonton

Hajar Ghorbani, a Ph.D. student of Anthropology, is one of the recipient of the CFUW bursary award at the University of Alberta.

CFUW Edmonton was founded in 1909 and is a non-partisan, voluntary, self-funded organization. Our membership is a community of women that have long history of successful efforts to improve the status of women at the local, provincial, national, and international levels and a commitment to continue those efforts today and into the future. Members are active in public affairs, work together for equality for women and girls, to raise the social, economic, political and legal status of women, as well as to improve education, the environment, peace, justice and human rights.

Hajar Ghorbani; Anthropology PhD Student receives Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship

Hajar Ghorbani; Anthropology PhD Student receives Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship

The Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarships are the most prestigious graduate awards administered by the University of Alberta. They are awarded to outstanding doctoral students who, at the time of application, have completed at least one year of graduate study. Killam Scholarships are awarded for two years and include a stipend of $45,000 per year. Each award is renewable for a second year upon continued exceptional performance in a doctoral program at the University of Alberta.

Hajar Ghorbani is a sociocultural anthropology PhD student at the University of Alberta specializing in death studies. Her research centers on the intersections of death and modernity, as well as death and politics in Iran and the Middle East. She has been studying death and dying since 2011 and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Iran for six years. Hajar’s contributions to the field include published research in several journal articles and book chapters. She has also played a pivotal role in developing death studies in her country, serving as the editor of The Social Studies of Death in Iran (2020). In recognition of her expertise, Hajar Ghorbani was invited as a keynote speaker at the Center for Death and Society (CDAS) at the University of Bath, UK, in 2022. Currently, in her doctoral research project titled “Dead Bodies’ Agency and Western Politics”, she is advancing the conventional perspectives in social sciences that assume the living govern the dead. Her work explores the agency of dead bodies that affect the experience and actions of mourners and evoke memories of the past rather than serve their socio-political ends.

The Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Monthly Meetings: Knowledge on Sale: The Privatization of Sociological Teaching in Iran

The Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Monthly Meetings: Knowledge on Sale: The Privatization of Sociological Teaching in Iran

I am pleased to share news about #The_Middle_Eastern_and_Islamic_Studies_Monthly_Meetings, a recurring gathering aimed at bringing together scholars and students in the field of Islamic/Muslim/Middle Eastern studies at the #University_of_Alberta. The meeting themes will be selected by presenters — professors and their graduate students.

I as the organizer of these monthly meetings hope that your active participation and support will not only bring our academic community together but also provide a valuable space for the consolidation of the #MEIS epistemic community and meaningful critical dialogue.

Our second meeting will feature a panel discussion titled “#Knowledge_on_Sale_The_Privitization_of_Sociological_Teaching_in_Iran“, with Professor #Zohreh_Bayatrizi and  #Reyhane_Javadi, chaired by Dr. #Richard_Westerman. The program will also include a documentary titled: From Palace to Prison: The Trials of Sociology in Iran, followed by refreshments, a meet & greet, and informal networking.

We invite you to join us on Tuesday, January 29, from 4:00 to 6:00 PM, at Tory Building 12-15.