On November 11, 2026, Dr. Fazil Moradi and Dr. Arianne Shahvisi will open the Kurdish Studies Forum with a keynote conversation on “The Historical, Political, and Theoretical Dimensions of Kurdnasî,” at 10:30 am in the AUIS Conference Hall.

Dr. Fazil Moradi is Senior Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; Associate Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; and Affiliated Scholar at the Centre for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity, CUNY, New York. Dr. Moradi was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow and Visiting Researcher at Hiroshima University; and has served as Writing Fellow and Visiting Associate Professor at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study; Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the University of Halle; and collaborator with medical scientists at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg. His recent publications include, Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation, co-edited by M. Six-Hohenbalken and R. Buchenhorst (Routledge, 2017); ‘In Search of Decolonized Political Futures’. Ed. Special Issue, Anthropological Theory (2023); Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq (Rutgers UP, 2024); ‘Worldwide-ization of Epistemicide’. Journal of Genocide Research (2025); ‘Beyond Repair: Modernity’s Toxic Afterlives from Minamata to Fukushima’. Ed. Special Issue, Janus Unbound (forthcoming, 2026).

Arianne Shahvisi is a philosopher with research interests in ethics, feminist philosophy, the philosophy of science, and social epistemology. Her current projects focus on reproductive justice, migration and borders, and global health. She teaches courses in moral philosophy, feminist bioethics, and global health ethics, and supervises graduate research projects. Arianne writes essays for the London Review of Books, and has also written for the Guardian, the Economist, and the Independent, among others. Her first book Arguing for a Better World: How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice(Penguin, John Murray) was published in 2023, and has been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Japanese. Arianne is joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics, a committee member for the Wellcome Trust, and a member of the Lancet Commission on Racism and Child Health.