**Note: this episode was recorded in late 2025, prior to the extremely violent suppression of protests in Iran, and prior to the strikes by the US and Israel that began in late February 2026**

“Being seen” has become a meme, pointing to the satisfaction felt at one’s true self being understood by another. But can we think more critically? Self-described “accidental” Professor of anthropology and ex-taxi driver Shahram Khosravi joins Uncommon Sense to discuss visibility, power, knowledge and the violence of unseeing. 

Shahram describes how growing up in Iran’s Bakhtiari culture shaped his own way of seeing  and taught him, early on, how some forms of knowing get legitimised while others are  dismissed - including in academia, where asking one question obscures the possibility of another. Here, he calls out the topsy turvy optics by which certain people - delivery workers, taxi drivers - go “actively unseen”, while others are loaded with value, visibility and esteem. Plus, he calls out those who ask “where are you from?” of the migrantised person. This “question”, he suggests, is often really a statement of non-recognition. 

An urgent conversation, with reflection on Édouard Glissant, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt. It is imperative, Shahram shows, that in what - via Arendt - he identifies as our present “dark times”, we challenge active “unseeing” and speak “clearly…with courage”.

Guest: Shahram Khosravi; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Shahram Khosravi

• How to Do Migration Studies in Dark Times
• "Bordered Imagination" in ‘Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems’ (2022) eds: S. Karami, Adr. Carbonell, H. Frichot, H. Frykholm
• Doing migration studies with an accent
• “The Archive of Stolen Breaths” in 'Breathe – Critical Research into the Inequalities of Life' (2023)
• The Holes
• 'Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran' (2017), University of Pennsylvania Press
• 'Young and Defiant in Tehran' (2008), University of Pennsylvania Press
• De Verbranders podcast, Episode 30: “Outside the Law”

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Listen to Rhoda Reddock on Margins, Angelique Nixon on Desire, Nandita Sharma on Natives 
• Why Stigma?

Further resources

• Miranda Fricker "Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing" (2007)
• Judith Butler "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?" (2016)
• Hannah Arendt "Men in Dark Times" (1968) 
• "For Opacity" in Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’, transl. Betsy Wing (1997/1990)

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