The awful smell of garbage: What we learned of studying Tehran's garbage archaeologically?

About the lecturer

Leila Papoli-Yazdi is a visiting scholar at the Department of Cultural Sciences, Linneaus University. She is an archaeologist of the recent past. Since 2003, she concentrated on the disaster archaeology of Bam, a city destroyed dramatically by an earthquake. Afterward, she directed several projects in Pakistan, Kuwait, and Iran. The main themes of her researches are oppression, gender, colonialism, and violence. Her works on political oppositions and nationalism from an archaeological viewpoint can be cited as pioneer works in Iran. Her works have been mostly published in scholarly anthropological and archaeological journals such as World Archaeology, Archaeologies, and International Journal of Historical Archaeology and also as chapters in edited volumes or as monographs in Persian and English. Her last published book is The Politics of the Past: The Representation of the Ancient Empires by Iran's the Modern States in which she is a co-author with Maryam Dezhamkhooy.
She lost her job as a professor of archaeology in 2012 and was the target of political pressure in Iran for over a decade. Subsequently, she applied to SAR and is working as a SAR scholar in Sweden since 2019. 

About SAR

The Vivian G. Prins Scholars at Risk (SAR) Speaker Series provide academic
institutions with the opportunity of inviting scholars to their environments and
learning first-hand about the threats against to academic freedom, the
experiences of scholars subjected to academic oppression, as well as to know
more about their research activity. SAR scholars represent diversity both in
relation to their country- specific backgrounds and their scholarly interests.
Read more about SAR here.