About

A. Marie Ranjbar is an Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar working at the intersection of political geography, critical human rights, and anticolonial feminist theories. Her research focuses on how activists negotiate legibility, recognition, and political agency under authoritarian and geopolitical constraints, with particular emphasis on environmental and social justice and transnational feminist solidarities. Her current project examines women’s contributions to early modern astronomy and explores the politics of cartographic and archival silence.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Law
• Epistemology
• Gender studies
• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Geography
• Environmental ethics
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Queering feminist geography III: calling all allies and accomplices

  Gender Place & Culture · 2025-09-29

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Iran as Subaltern Empire: Lake Orumiyeh, Environmental Injustice, and Coloniality in Iranian Azerbaijan

  Antipode · 2024-11-04 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In recent years, protests have emerged to save Lake Orumiyeh, which has nearly vanished following decades of agricultural development, dam building, and drought. Lake Orumiyeh is located in Iranian Azerbaijan, which sits at the intersection of three former empires: Persian, Ottoman, and Russian. Iranian Azerbaijan is largely comprised of ethno‐linguistic minority communities that are unevenly impacted by environmental hazards stemming from the lake's desiccation, and protests to save the lake are generally characterised as environmental conflict resulting from climate change or as a reflection of ethno‐nationalist tensions in Iran. These readings, however, fail to account for how imperial pasts and colonial presents shape exposure to environmental violence. This article posits that environmental violence functions as a form of coloniality and, using Lake Orumiyeh as an entry point, aims to: (i) examine coloniality in a country that was never formally colonised yet impacted by different formations of empire; (ii) account for subjectivities shaped through non‐Western European forms of imperialism; and (iii) connect racialised difference in Iran to the reproduction of colonial and racial logics vis‐à‐vis European imperialism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Research through Passing in and

  Punctum Books · 2024-10-27

  book-chapterSenior author

  Through parallel ethnographic vignettes in Tibet and Iran, which converge at a number of points around questions of national origin, research access, surveillance, and the cutting off of ties to family members and close friends, this chapter considers “passing” in the field as a form of self-redaction. We conceptualize this type of self-redaction as a double-edged sword, simultaneously a protective response to state surveillance, which enables movement through selective erasure, and a form of complicity that reinforces authoritarian state power. Through these vignettes, we also reflect on the contradictions between the ways in which self-redaction may be an ethical choice in contexts where interlocutors do not want to be responsible for the knowledge of fieldworkers’ citizenship status, and the liberal presumptions of Institutional Research Boards about ethics.

  PublisherDOI

• The Double Bind of Displacement: U.S. Sanctions, the Muslim Ban, and Experiences of Dislocation for Iranians Pursuing Higher Education in the United States

  2023-03-29 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, I examine the material and affective impacts of U.S. foreign policy on Iranians pursuing higher education in the United States. I argue that punitive policies against Iran have created a double bind for Iranians, in which in situ displacement becomes a defining feature of life. I first situate the concept of in situ displacement within feminist theories of displacement and geopolitics to describe the incremental loss of economic, political, and social security in daily life, while remaining in place. Second, I analyze how U.S. foreign policy toward Iran results in in situ displacement for Iranian students, including feeling stuck in place due to restrictive visas, long delays in green card processing, and fears that they cannot reenter the United States if they travel to Iran. Drawing on key informant interviews and the analysis of U.S. regulatory documents, I demonstrate how the Trump administration’s Muslim ban laid bare different modalities of violence produced through four decades of punitive policies toward Iran. My analysis of sanctions, alongside the Muslim ban, reveals a complicated patchwork of regulations that are intended to target the Iranian state, yet these policies can have devastating consequences for Iranian students. I conclude with how these cases, although diverse, offer insight into how tensions between the United States and Iran result in multiple and varied forms of displacement, from the scale of the home to the geopolitical.

  PublisherDOI

• Woman, Life, Freedom: Decoding the feminist uprising in Iran

  Political Geography · 2023 · 20 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  PublisherDOI

• The Double Bind of Displacement: U.S. Sanctions, the Muslim Ban, and Experiences of Dislocation for Iranians Pursuing Higher Education in the United States

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2022-02-23 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, I examine the material and affective impacts of U.S. foreign policy on Iranians pursuing higher education in the United States. I argue that punitive policies against Iran have created a double bind for Iranians, in which in situ displacement becomes a defining feature of life. I first situate the concept of in situ displacement within feminist theories of displacement and geopolitics to describe the incremental loss of economic, political, and social security in daily life, while remaining in place. Second, I analyze how U.S. foreign policy toward Iran results in in situ displacement for Iranian students, including feeling stuck in place due to restrictive visas, long delays in green card processing, and fears that they cannot reenter the United States if they travel to Iran. Drawing on key informant interviews and the analysis of U.S. regulatory documents, I demonstrate how the Trump administration’s Muslim ban laid bare different modalities of violence produced through four decades of punitive policies toward Iran. My analysis of sanctions, alongside the Muslim ban, reveals a complicated patchwork of regulations that are intended to target the Iranian state, yet these policies can have devastating consequences for Iranian students. I conclude with how these cases, although diverse, offer insight into how tensions between the United States and Iran result in multiple and varied forms of displacement, from the scale of the home to the geopolitical.

  PublisherDOI

• The greening of human rights in Iran: Lake Orumiyeh, human rights, and environmental justice

  Environment and Planning E Nature and Space · 2022 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  In the mid-2000s, a social movement emerged in northwestern Iran to demand increased environmental protections for Lake Orumiyeh. Once among the largest saltwater lakes in the world, Lake Orumiyeh has undergone rapid desiccation, losing nearly 90 per cent of its surface area over the past two decades. Conceptually, the aim of this article is to examine how protesters in Orumiyeh used environmental justice, both as a concept and political strategy, to make human rights claims against the Iranian state. I posit that environmental justice functions as a coded language in this political context, where it is challenging to speak openly about human rights. Drawing from environmental justice and critical human rights literature in geography, combined with an empirical and visual analysis of protests to save Lake Orumiyeh, I analyze how protesters strategically ‘greened’ the language of human rights to protect themselves from state violence. I compare two protests organized in 2010 and 2011 to demonstrate how the site of the lake was used to signify broader grievances against the state. Through a comparison of the affective tone and state response to the protests, I explicate both the importance and the limits of ‘greening’ human rights as a protest strategy. Taken together, these case studies illustrate how limiting activism to binary frameworks of the environmental or political renders invisible the multidimensional claims of protesters. My study demonstrates the importance of widening our analytical gaze to incorporate protests that register rights claims outside of the normative framework of human rights, thereby accounting for political contexts where alternative rights narratives are both strategic and necessary.

  PublisherDOI

• Coming of age in a straight white man’s geography: reflections on positionality and relationality as feminist anti-oppressive praxis

  Gender Place & Culture · 2021 · 31 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  In this intervention, we consider how relational thinking about our positions and experiences can contribute to a feminist, anti-oppressive praxis in geography. Hosting a critical dialogue amongst ourselves, we collectively reflect on our experiences coming of age in a discipline marked by ongoing forms of coloniality, racism, sexism, and trans/homophobia in an attempt to find commonalities across our different identities and experiences. Drawing from feminist thought and situating these evolving and polyvocal concepts within our experiences as feminist geographers, we consider what relationality and its associated practices can accomplish within our institutions. We also critique how feminist approaches such as these are taken up and deployed in ‘critical’ spaces, yet often fail to transform power dynamics long characterizing the discipline and its institutional spaces. In doing so, we aim to develop a feminist geographic praxis that recognizes our fluid subjectivities and the different positions we inhabit in the academy while also contributing to a sense of solidarity and commonality-in-difference. We revisit and build upon feminist concepts of positionality and relationality to both name the identity politics of the field and to fashion a way toward more inclusive spaces shaped by mutuality, recognition, and an anti-oppressive praxis.

  PublisherDOI

• Praxis in the City

  2020-06-05

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Care

  2019-03-01 · 7 citations

  other

  This chapter calls for a "Manifesto of Radical Care" in Geography. The call for radical care acknowledges the Whiteness that permeates much of the feminist literature of care. Black and postcolonial theorists, such as Patricia Hill Collins and Uma Narayan, have called for feminist scholars to adopt more inclusive approaches to the development of a care praxis. A radical ethics of care might seem incongruous, as "radical" usually invokes far-reaching social change, while understandings of "care" often point to the private, personal and intimate. A serious engagement with uncomfortable intimacies offers a starting point for moving beyond incomplete and superficial acknowledgments of vulnerability, and towards a more holistic and radical conceptualisation of care across difference. Many of us who employ a radical caring praxis are cast as "feminist killjoys", including in our disciplinary homes, a term that Sara Ahmed utilises to encapsulate detractors' silence accompanied by micro-aggressions when killjoys speak out within their institutions.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emily T. Yeh

  University of Colorado System

  4 shared

• Lorraine Dowler

  3 shared

• Hanieh Haji Molana

  California State University System

  1 shared

• Jenna Christian

  Bucknell University

  1 shared

• Sahar Razavi

  1 shared

• Eyo Ewara

  Loyola University Chicago

  1 shared

• Aparna Parikh

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

• Eden Kinkaid

  University of Arizona

  1 shared