Project Description
Home / Members / Graduate Students / Rojina Sabetiashraf
RESEARCH AREAS:
Visual Culture
Embodiment
Protest
CONTACT:
Rotman Institute of Philosophy
Western University
Western Interdisciplinary Research Building
London, Ontario, Canada
N6A 3K7
ROJINA SABETIASHRAF
Doctoral Student
Visual Arts, Western University
Rojina Sabetiashraf is a PhD student in Art History and Visual Culture at Western University. Her research explores protest, embodiment, and performance in art spaces such as museums, with a focus on how acts of dissent reshape cultural institutions and public life. By examining these spaces as contested, her work engages with questions of authority, visibility, and civic responsibility, and contributes to critical museum studies, performance studies, and visual culture. She is originally from Iran, and holds an MA in History of Art, Design & Visual Culture from the University of Alberta, where her thesis investigated embodied experiences in museum spaces, and a BA from the University of Tehran.
I am a PhD student in Art History and Visual Culture at Western University. My research interrogates protest in museums and art spaces as a form of embodied performance. I am particularly interested in how vulnerability functions as both a strategy of resistance and a mode of visibility for bodies. Drawing from performance studies and critical museum theory, I examine how institutional spaces are (re)shaped through occupation, disruption, and visibility, and how museums negotiate, contain, or resist these interventions. My approach is interdisciplinary: I integrate qualitative methods (archival research, semi-structured interviews, and media analysis) with theories of embodiment and presence to document how protests produce ecologies of presence, how they expose the precarious position of cultural institutions in civic life, and how bodies perform in these spaces. My doctoral work builds on my MA thesis at the University of Alberta, which investigated embodied modes of spectatorship at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art using phenomenological and feminist frameworks. That project developed my methodological grounding in participant observation and interview-based research, while also situating embodiment as a site of both constraint and resistance in institutional contexts.
Edited Journals
Sabetiashraf, Rojina. “Embodied Experience in the Museum Context: Museum Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.” RENDER Graduate Journal of Art & Culture 9 (Winter 2024).
Theses
The Power of Presence: Iranian Women’s Embodied Experience at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. MA Thesis
Fall and Winter 2024-25, Introduction to Media and Technology, TA
Talks
“Global New Media Arts and Theoretical Approaches.” Introduction to Art History, University of Tehran, Nov. 2024.
“Concept of Time and Visualizing Temporality.” HADVC 511: Decolonizing Time, University of Alberta, Oct. 2024.
“Modern Photography and Colonialism.” Introduction to Art History, University of Tehran, Oct. 2024.
“Art Museums and Galleries in Tehran and Cultural Identity.” University of Tehran, July 2023.
“Pro-seminar Series for Graduate Students.” University of Alberta, Sept. 2022.
“Tehran in Stops: Documenting the City.” University of Tehran, Dec. 2019.
Conference Presentations
“Confronting Absence: New Media Art and New Materialism Approaches to Destruction.” Wrecks & Tech: Emotion, Ethics and Advanced Technologies Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, July 26, 2024.
“Acts of Resistance: Iranian Women’s Narratives at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.” Towards Intersectional and Resilient Futures: Gender and Social Justice Conference, University of Alberta, March 22–23, 2024.
“Embodied Experience in the Museum Context: Museum Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts.” Sign of Times: Examining Aesthetics After Trauma, Carleton University, Ottawa, May 5, 2023.