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The Annual Front Line Defenders Lecture was established in 2013 to provoke discussion and debate about the range of issues affecting human rights defenders as they work tirelessly to bring about changes and build robust civil societies. Held in partnership with universities in Dublin, Belfast and Galway, the lecture is broadly accessible to a general audience with an interest in philosophy, law, human rights or politics.

The Galway lecture will be hosted in the Dillon Theatre, Arts/Science Building, University of Galway on Friday, 31st March from 2.00pm - 3.30pm.

See more details and register below:

Dublin: https://bit.ly/42aUmzx

Galway: https://bit.ly/3TdoTZt

Belfast: https://bit.ly/400eVNc

Speaker: Parvin Ardalan

Parvin Ardalan is a feminist activist, journalist, and writer with a background in the grassroots feminist movement in Iran. She is currently a board member of Swedish PEN and a member of the network Feminists for Jina. She currently works at the Unit for Documentation and Freedom of Expression at Malmö City Archives.

Her interest in gender, social movements, and migration led her to launch a process in a joint effort with civil society and numerous cultural institutions to create Women Making HERstory – a project committed to the unveiling, visualising, and rewriting the life and work of women with migration backgrounds in Sweden. Her next process was launching Migration Memory Encounters, where the knowledge, experiences, and memories of migrants in various cultural fields have been rediscovered through live performances and installations in Sweden.

She was a co-founder of the Women’s Cultural Center and The One Million Signature Campaign in Iran – a grassroots movement aimed at repealing discriminatory laws against women in Iran. She was awarded the Olof Palme Prize In 2007 and has lived in exile since 2009. She was the first guest writer of Malmö City (2010-2012) in Sweden under the ICORN (The International Cities of Refuge Network) programme.

Lecture description:

The government’s murder of Jina Amini in September 2022 rocketed Iranian society into a revolutionary moment where women emerged as a symbol of resistance at the intersection of all forms of discrimination. In this paradigm shift, the past and current protest movements are linked together through the celebrated slogan of “Jin Jian Azadi”.

In her lecture, Parvin will unpack the current revolutionary moment in Iran. How and why did the government’s murder of Jina take us to this particular point? Join us as Parvin discusses the radical potential and meaning of ''Jin, Jian, Azadi'' (Woman, Life, Freedom). She will insist on the entangled relation of the three elements of this slogan and as such will argue that this slogan by linking the everyday and material necessities of life to the abstract notion of ‘rights’ opens a new horizon of feminist politics for Iran, in specific and the human rights discourse in general.