Zandi

Preliminary abstract: This research seeks to examine the relationship between memory, space, subjectivity, religion, and the state, through an ethnography of state-sponsored fieldtrips to the Iran-Iraq War battlefields and the war-related museums as part of schools’ extracurricular activities in contemporary Iran. I explore the divergent modes of subjectivity that emerge from encounters with dominant forms of governance, focusing on the experiences of those who witnessed the war and the young generation, who navigate the future potentialities and possibilities in discursive and affective spaces of the past (the Iran-Iraq War). I propose that the Iran-Iraq war landscapes and the emerging ‘Holy Defense’ museums are not merely relics of the past (Adorno 1967), but spaces of becoming (Bond 2017; Deleuze 1987, Khan 2012; Lefebvre 1991; Ranci’re 2016), where ideologically sacralized spaces turn into sites of contestation, transgression, and exchange between different forces of power (Bakhtin 1981; Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1980; De Certeau 1980; Talebi 2007).