About

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The projects here are located within what is broadly known as the Iranian Plateau, which by definition include parts of West and Central Asia. 

Specifically, so far these projects are in West Asia. The notion of West Asia is productive in the sense that it is less value laden than terms such as the MIddle East or Persianate, but allows for acknowledging the influence of historical and modern civilizations that have shaped the present cultural relations in that region, namely, Turkic, Persian, Arabic and Russian (European).  

These projects examine the imaginations of the past in this region and the ways in which those imaginations are activated and used in re-conceiving regional and sub-regional identities at various scales; identities that  frequently transcend the geographies of nation-states.  

In this geographical context, a number of questions that are worth probing. They include:

• How is the past used in justifying the present national and regional relationships?

• How is the present culture shaped by conceptions of the past and how is that conception/imagination actualisd in the form of official (and unofficial) heritage?

• What are the trans-border forms of imagining the past and how does the presence of such trans-border phenomena affect formations of identity?

• How are borders conceived and re-conceived in relation to pasts?

• What are the useful conceptual apparatuses through which such relations with the past can be understood and explained in the present?