'Unlearning' at SOAS

I have started a Masters programme in Media studies at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London this Autumn.

The wonderful thing about this programme is that it is structured under Anthropology with a post-colonial and post-structuralist leaning. So all of us are going through an amazing experience of breaking our previous Euro-American centric intellectual habits or knowledge structures that has been imposed on us for decades.

As if we have got addicted to breathe in air of certain ways of thinking and knowing and now we are encouraged to quit.

I would like to call this process "unlearning," and to be honest, unlearning is a painful but liberating experience.

Playing with Marx's words, we, the addicted, have nothing to lose in this process of unlearning but our knowledge chains. And of course, we have a world to win.

So I'm going to use this space, in addition to my notes on Iran, to share some of my thoughts and ideas during this process of unlearning which is inspired by what I hear and what I read these days. They are obviously going to be very sketchy and flawed. But that's also an excersie for me to try to find a new language I need to talk articulate myself in this new setting.