Faranak Miraftab | The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
ABOUT FARANAK MIRAFTAB
Faranak Miraftab is an urban scholar of globalization. Her scholarship is situated at the intersection of sociology, geography, planning, and feminist studies, using case study and ethnographic methodologies. She is particularly interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens’ struggles for dignified livelihood — namely, how groups disadvantaged by class, gender, race, and ethnicity mobilize for resources such as shelter, basic infrastructure, and services and how institutional arrangements facilitate and frustrate provision and access to such vital urban resources.
A native of Iran, Miraftab's research and teaching has spanned several regions including the Middle East, Latin America, Southern Africa, and North America. In the 1990s, she studied this relationship through the experience of low-income communities, particularly female-headed households in Latin America; and since the late-1990s, she has studied the struggle for justice and equity through the experience of racialized township residents in post-apartheid South Africa. Her most recent work among immigrants and displaced laborers in the US is culmination of earlier research revealing the intimate connections in community development processes across the globe including Michoacán, Mexico, Lomé, Togo and the rustbelt of United States. Winning several book awards, Miraftab's Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking exposes global inequalities and development connections and dependencies that intimately connect communities across the globe through a multi-sited ethnography and a relational frame of analysis, revealing the role of transnational families and their everyday practices of care. For a documentary based on Global Heartland interviews, see “Moving Flesh,” produced by artist-scholar-activists Sarah Ross and Ryan Griffis.
In 2014, she was selected as University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University Scholar, a prestigious award the University of Illinois bestows on its faculty for excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service.
