Date: October 16 2022
Time: 3:00PM EST
Location:
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20008
Description: In The Other Side of Silence, a skilled storyteller who has spent her life in two worlds, Mahnaz Afkhami shares her unexpected and meteoric rise from unassuming English professor to a champion of women’s rights in Iran; the clash between Western feminists and those from the Global South; and the challenges of international women’s rights work during the so-called war on terror. Her journey through exile shows what it takes to launch and sustain a worldwide grassroots movement: funding, an ever-expanding network, conferences, education, and decades of hard work requiring individuals and organizations to persevere despite ongoing wars, humanitarian disasters, and climate change. Told with humor, honesty, and compassion, Afkhami’s remarkable story illuminates the possibility of bringing opportunity and choice to women across the world.
Born in Kerman, Iran, Mahnaz Afkhami is the founder and president of Women’s Learning Partnership, executive director of the Foundation for Iranian Studies, and former minister for women’s affairs in Iran. She lives and works in Bethesda, Maryland.
Afkhami will be in conversation with Azar Nafisi. Nafisi is the author of the multi-award-winning New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, as well as Things I’ve Been Silent About, The Republic of Imagination, and That Other World. Her most recent book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, is a guide to the power of literature in turbulent times, arming readers with a resistance reading list. Formerly the director of The Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations at Johns Hopkins University’s Foreign Policy Institute, she served as a Centennial Fellow at Georgetown University and has taught at Oxford and several universities in Tehran.
